Justice.
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Friday, May 29, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Film review: V/H/S.
You know what I miss? Stupid, dumb, meat and potatoes slasher films. There's a killer, he kills people, mostly idiotic, annoying teenagers who may or may not have been in some way responsible for why he is the way he is, he does it in inventive, amusing ways, with or without wisecracks, until there's only one left, often a young woman, who manages to outsmart him. The door is left open for a sequel, it's all accomplished in 80-100 minutes, the colour theme of the film is vibrant rather than washed out brown/green, it's not lensed by a cinematographer with Saint Vitus' dance, and the editor refuses the temptation to make a bazillion cuts every nanosecond.
Is that too much to ask? Is it really necessary for every other new "horror" film to be a part of the "found footage" genre, or to follow the lead set by the Paranormal Activity series of films, which seemingly exist only so as to make life even more miserable for the zero-hour, minimum wage slaves at the local World of Cine who have to pick up all the spilt popcorn between screenings? How is it I cannot think of a single horror film released in the past 5 years other than American Mary that I would watch again? I haven't seen It Follows, You're Next or As Above, So Below yet, all of which have had somewhat decent reviews, but I'm really not getting my hopes up for any of them.
And so we come to V/H/S. Not only is it a found footage horror film, it's a portmanteau/anthology found footage horror film! That means there's not just 120 minutes of shaky, wibbly, constantly breaking up and decayed video to enjoy, but it's broken up into segments, sort of but not really tied together by the conceit of a gang of idiots breaking into a house to steal a tape, only they don't know what it is or what's on it.
Except the film doesn't so much as bother to follow that conceit, as on a couple of occasions the next segment just begins without one of our intrepid heroes pressing play. Still, we're not really here for the plot, we're here for the spookums aren't we, so what does it matter?
The film then opens with a sexual assault. Yep. Turns out our narrators, or at least guides have been making $50 a pop by grabbing women on the street and exposing their breasts, all the while filming their attacks. These are then posted online. They do this, needless to say, in broad daylight, without covering their faces. Only one of the group has found out they can make a whole heap more dough by just breaking into this one house and stealing a tape. They don't ask for any more details, they'll just know when they've found it.
There is, of course, a dead guy in the house, in front of the obligatory stack of TVs and video machines. Which tape is it? Why do they not just gather up all the tapes and leave to review them elsewhere, as indeed one of the group suggests at one point, only to decide it's a fanciful idea? Why are they filming everything they're doing? Why I have not already switched this rubbish off?
The leery, nasty tone set from the off continues in our first segment, Amateur Night, directed by David Bruckner. Our new group of 3 bros have only scored a pair of those spy glasses off the interwebs, the sort "used" by reality porn producers to film them picking up a random woman off the street and then having a rather jolly time together! Guess what they're going to do with the glasses? Do you think things won't go according to plan? Do you think that despite the implication being this is meant to suggest objectifying women isn't a good thing it won't in fact do anything of the kind? Do you think the pay off despite everything being wrong will be worth it, rather than a mess of CGI and shaky cam? Does the director think everyone in the audience won't be asking themselves WHY HASN'T HE TAKEN THE GODDAMN GLASSES OFF?
Next up is director Ti West, known for 2009's House of the Devil, with "Second Honeymoon". His segment ends with one of the goons asking, "what the fuck was that?". My sentiments exactly. The one thing that can be said in its favour is that if you were to find a tape with a real murder filmed on it, it would probably make as little sense as his section does. Couple on a road trip, film themselves as they go along, only there's someone letting themselves into their hotel room who picks the camera up and records them as they sleep, only THEY USE A LIGHT AND YET IT SOMEHOW DOESN'T WAKE THE COUPLE UP. Nor does the couple notice anything amiss, apart from some money having gone missing. It's dreadful.
We then have Glenn McQuaid's "Tuesday the 17th", which as you would expect from the title is sort of playing with genre conventions except not really. Best of the bunch which is saying very little is Joe Swanberg's The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger, which consists of Skype chats between a couple living apart, with the Emily of the title convinced her apartment is haunted. It is, and yet it isn't. In fact it's something far worse. It's not in the slightest bit scary, but it does switch things up after what's gone before, although again there's some unnecessary leeriness. Last is "10/31/98", and we are back once again into everything that is wrong with the found footage genre. Our gang of slightly older bros don't think to call the police and instead steam in to save the victim of some crazies at a house where they thought there was a Halloween party, with the expected consequences.
The problem with "found footage" is it asks you to suspend your disbelief twice over. While you can accept the horror genre's tropes of the victims of the masked assailant being stupid and either unable/unwilling to call for help, to do so when you're also being asked to believe that what you're viewing is a document of something that happened is a step too far. It can work only in certain specific circumstances, whether it be in the woods like Blair Witch Project, away from a phone signal, or in the depths of the rainforest as in Cannibal Holocaust. That the high point of the genre is still the one that started it all rather suggests it's not going to be improved upon. Please filmmakers, for the sake of our sanity, give it a rest.
Is that too much to ask? Is it really necessary for every other new "horror" film to be a part of the "found footage" genre, or to follow the lead set by the Paranormal Activity series of films, which seemingly exist only so as to make life even more miserable for the zero-hour, minimum wage slaves at the local World of Cine who have to pick up all the spilt popcorn between screenings? How is it I cannot think of a single horror film released in the past 5 years other than American Mary that I would watch again? I haven't seen It Follows, You're Next or As Above, So Below yet, all of which have had somewhat decent reviews, but I'm really not getting my hopes up for any of them.
And so we come to V/H/S. Not only is it a found footage horror film, it's a portmanteau/anthology found footage horror film! That means there's not just 120 minutes of shaky, wibbly, constantly breaking up and decayed video to enjoy, but it's broken up into segments, sort of but not really tied together by the conceit of a gang of idiots breaking into a house to steal a tape, only they don't know what it is or what's on it.
Except the film doesn't so much as bother to follow that conceit, as on a couple of occasions the next segment just begins without one of our intrepid heroes pressing play. Still, we're not really here for the plot, we're here for the spookums aren't we, so what does it matter?
The film then opens with a sexual assault. Yep. Turns out our narrators, or at least guides have been making $50 a pop by grabbing women on the street and exposing their breasts, all the while filming their attacks. These are then posted online. They do this, needless to say, in broad daylight, without covering their faces. Only one of the group has found out they can make a whole heap more dough by just breaking into this one house and stealing a tape. They don't ask for any more details, they'll just know when they've found it.
There is, of course, a dead guy in the house, in front of the obligatory stack of TVs and video machines. Which tape is it? Why do they not just gather up all the tapes and leave to review them elsewhere, as indeed one of the group suggests at one point, only to decide it's a fanciful idea? Why are they filming everything they're doing? Why I have not already switched this rubbish off?
The leery, nasty tone set from the off continues in our first segment, Amateur Night, directed by David Bruckner. Our new group of 3 bros have only scored a pair of those spy glasses off the interwebs, the sort "used" by reality porn producers to film them picking up a random woman off the street and then having a rather jolly time together! Guess what they're going to do with the glasses? Do you think things won't go according to plan? Do you think that despite the implication being this is meant to suggest objectifying women isn't a good thing it won't in fact do anything of the kind? Do you think the pay off despite everything being wrong will be worth it, rather than a mess of CGI and shaky cam? Does the director think everyone in the audience won't be asking themselves WHY HASN'T HE TAKEN THE GODDAMN GLASSES OFF?
Next up is director Ti West, known for 2009's House of the Devil, with "Second Honeymoon". His segment ends with one of the goons asking, "what the fuck was that?". My sentiments exactly. The one thing that can be said in its favour is that if you were to find a tape with a real murder filmed on it, it would probably make as little sense as his section does. Couple on a road trip, film themselves as they go along, only there's someone letting themselves into their hotel room who picks the camera up and records them as they sleep, only THEY USE A LIGHT AND YET IT SOMEHOW DOESN'T WAKE THE COUPLE UP. Nor does the couple notice anything amiss, apart from some money having gone missing. It's dreadful.
We then have Glenn McQuaid's "Tuesday the 17th", which as you would expect from the title is sort of playing with genre conventions except not really. Best of the bunch which is saying very little is Joe Swanberg's The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger, which consists of Skype chats between a couple living apart, with the Emily of the title convinced her apartment is haunted. It is, and yet it isn't. In fact it's something far worse. It's not in the slightest bit scary, but it does switch things up after what's gone before, although again there's some unnecessary leeriness. Last is "10/31/98", and we are back once again into everything that is wrong with the found footage genre. Our gang of slightly older bros don't think to call the police and instead steam in to save the victim of some crazies at a house where they thought there was a Halloween party, with the expected consequences.
The problem with "found footage" is it asks you to suspend your disbelief twice over. While you can accept the horror genre's tropes of the victims of the masked assailant being stupid and either unable/unwilling to call for help, to do so when you're also being asked to believe that what you're viewing is a document of something that happened is a step too far. It can work only in certain specific circumstances, whether it be in the woods like Blair Witch Project, away from a phone signal, or in the depths of the rainforest as in Cannibal Holocaust. That the high point of the genre is still the one that started it all rather suggests it's not going to be improved upon. Please filmmakers, for the sake of our sanity, give it a rest.
Labels: film review, films, horror, non-politics, V/H/S
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Wednesday, May 27, 2015
The Queen's speech: the worst is here.
My yearly shtick when it comes to the Queen's speech is to bore on about how fantastically absurd the spectacle is. People in full possession of their faculties walking backwards; the shutting of doors in faces in reference to something that happened during the reign of Ethelred the Unready; Lords and Ladies done up as though they're going to an especially classy fancy dress keys in the bowl party afterwards; the BBC in full obsequious mode, which still isn't good enough for the Mail and Telegraph; and its heralding, defining, dunderheaded centrepiece is Brenda, in full regalia complete with crown weighing the same as a new born infant, reading out an essay inscribed on goatskin vellum as written by a slightly dim 15-year-old GCSE politics student. Liz, bless her, is 90 next year. Surely the time has come for her to tell the idiots who keep insisting she involves herself in this pantomime to fawk off.
Only the point has finally been reached where it's not the pomp and circumstance itself which is most absurd, it's the speech itself. Queenie has had to read out some nonsense in her time, and has managed somehow to keep her thoughts to herself on just what she thinks about having to say things like "Northern powerhouse". Never before though has the speech reached such heights of fatuity, been so obviously and deliberately contradictory, to the point where it's obvious that the Tories are rubbing everyone's noses in it, and so aggravatingly obtuse.
It starts in the opening sentence. "My Government (because it is Her government, just as we serfs are subjects, not citizens) will legislate in the interests of everyone in our country". No, that's an impossibility; what the writer means is the government will legislate in what it believes to be everyone's best interests, which is a rather different thing altogether. "It will adopt a one nation approach," which means whatever the government says is a one nation approach, "helping working people get on," meaning absolutely nothing, "supporting aspiration", which means precisely what it says, "giving new opportunities to the most disadvantaged," by saying you're on your own pal, "and bringing different parts of our country together," presumably by uniting them in opposition to the Tories.
And so it goes on. Apparently the long-term plan was, is to provide economic stability and security at every stage of life, which is a new one on me. Legislation will be brought forward to help achieve full employment, as will legislation to provide raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, and provide more people with the security of a job. Not with job security, take note, but the security of a job. Nor is the referendum on EU membership anything to do with David Cameron's pathetic kowtowing to his backbenchers during the coalition; no, the government will pursue reform of the European Union for the benefit of all Member States. What a kind, loving, generous, selfless gesture on the part of the Tories, eh?
On reading the Tory manifesto, it seemed fairly apparent that so bonkers was much of its content it had been put together with the intention of bartering away the more reprehensible parts in the coalition negotiations. They weren't really going to cut £12bn from welfare, not least as they couldn't begin to explain where they could make such massive savings, and they weren't going to really legislate to make it illegal to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, that's just unbelievably stupid. They're not that stupid, are they? No, David Cameron and George Osborne are sensible chaps underneath the laughable skin suits they wear, and the remaining Lib Dems will see they don't go through with this blazing idiocy.
If the Tories didn't expect to be implementing their manifesto as a whole, as we're told they didn't, then winning a majority put them in a happy conundrum. Do they now row back from the lunatic bribes they came up with, like selling off houses they don't so much as own on the cheap, or abolishing inheritance tax, breaking promises they never believed in to begin with? Or do they carry on regardless, as to not do so would be to aggravate the exact people, mainly the backbenchers, who did think the party meant it?
Well, now we have the answer. The strange thing is all the comment on the decision to "delay" abolishing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a mythical "British" Bill of Rights, which while always a completely stupid idea and utterly pointless without leaving the European Convention is not even close to the barking mad imbecility of the manifesto promises that were in the speech. That getting rid of the HRA is the one thing that seems to unite the disparate elements in the Commons, important as resisting such an act of vandalism is, says much of just what isn't going to face the same level of opposition. It has at least shown precisely how the Sun and Mail intend to play matters from here on out: again, not for them concerns about putting moron restrictions on tax, but rage at how they still won't get their way, having been principally responsible for the demonisation of the HRA. How dare the government they got elected snub them so?
As Rafael Behr wrote this morning, most Tories are taking their unexpected victory as proof both of just how brilliant they are and the uselessness of their opponents. This is hardly surprising when the SNP, declaring itself the unofficial opposition, isn't content with its 56 seats in Scotland and would rather like to force Alistair Carmichael into resigning for daring to leak something that portrayed poor wee Nicola Sturgeon in a less flattering light. In such circumstances are bad laws passed, not least when Labour as led by Harriet Harman is in such a supine, self-absorbed mood. Deciding not to oppose the EU referendum which is now coming like it or not is one thing; to not continue to oppose the cut in the benefit cap to £23,000 is quite another. Exceptional circumstances don't apparently mean anything to a party hierarchy convinced that it was not being quite harsh enough on those on benefits that did for them.
It's all the more dispiriting when there were quite so many breathtakingly awful laws proposed in the speech, including some that will directly target Labour. Not given a direct mention was the reintroduction of the redrawing of the constituency boundaries, destined to make a Labour majority even harder, although you can bet it will return at some stage. Instead the Tories made do with a surprise inserting into the proposed Trade Unions Bill of an opt-in system for the political fund element of union subscriptions, as clearly we can't have ordinary hard-working people funding parties, as opposed to the super-rich. The obscene hypocrisy of a government legislating to require strike ballots are supported by 40% of those eligible when it won only 36.9% of the vote meanwhile is chutzpah defined.
Then there's the clusterfuck of Home Office bills, including not just the "extremism" bill, introduced by David Cameron saying that no longer would government leave alone those who obey the law and the return of a supercharged communications bill destined to give the intelligence agencies total legal cover to do whatever the hell they like with our data, but also an overarching criminalisation of (il)legal highs. Only the government obviously can't call them that, and so has decided on "psychoactive substances" instead. I joked not so long back it would be easier if the government started declaring what was legal as opposed to illegal, and yet this is exactly what they are proposing to do. Yes, apparently under this new bill "any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect" will be made illegal, except for those it defines are legal. Older heads might be reminded of the difficulty government lawyers had in giving the police powers to shut down free parties, which led to the Criminal Justice Act of 94 defining in law the music being targeted as consisting of "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". It doesn't seem to have gotten through to our lawmakers the only reason the "legal high" market has flourished is precisely because of the illegality of and restrictions placed on the manufacture of MDMA and the rest, just as it didn't occur to them back in 94 that you'll never stop people from trying to enjoy themselves, but then what else is government for? Someone, I forget who, once said the Daily Mail owed its existence to the outrage some feel that others are out there having fun, and so the same could be said of so many of our politicians.
There is perhaps one worthwhile bill in the whole lot, and that's the childcare act. Except doubling the number of hours of free childcare available for three and four-year-olds looks certain to be giving with one hand and taking with the other, as tax credits will most likely be cut in the search for the £12bn from welfare. Which just reminds us this is only the beginning of 2 years of unrelenting misery, with George Osborne due to deliver his second budget of the year on July the 8th, setting out precisely how hard and fast we're going to be screwed. As someone I need to thank for yet again putting up with my shit recently said, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Only the point has finally been reached where it's not the pomp and circumstance itself which is most absurd, it's the speech itself. Queenie has had to read out some nonsense in her time, and has managed somehow to keep her thoughts to herself on just what she thinks about having to say things like "Northern powerhouse". Never before though has the speech reached such heights of fatuity, been so obviously and deliberately contradictory, to the point where it's obvious that the Tories are rubbing everyone's noses in it, and so aggravatingly obtuse.
It starts in the opening sentence. "My Government (because it is Her government, just as we serfs are subjects, not citizens) will legislate in the interests of everyone in our country". No, that's an impossibility; what the writer means is the government will legislate in what it believes to be everyone's best interests, which is a rather different thing altogether. "It will adopt a one nation approach," which means whatever the government says is a one nation approach, "helping working people get on," meaning absolutely nothing, "supporting aspiration", which means precisely what it says, "giving new opportunities to the most disadvantaged," by saying you're on your own pal, "and bringing different parts of our country together," presumably by uniting them in opposition to the Tories.
And so it goes on. Apparently the long-term plan was, is to provide economic stability and security at every stage of life, which is a new one on me. Legislation will be brought forward to help achieve full employment, as will legislation to provide raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, and provide more people with the security of a job. Not with job security, take note, but the security of a job. Nor is the referendum on EU membership anything to do with David Cameron's pathetic kowtowing to his backbenchers during the coalition; no, the government will pursue reform of the European Union for the benefit of all Member States. What a kind, loving, generous, selfless gesture on the part of the Tories, eh?
On reading the Tory manifesto, it seemed fairly apparent that so bonkers was much of its content it had been put together with the intention of bartering away the more reprehensible parts in the coalition negotiations. They weren't really going to cut £12bn from welfare, not least as they couldn't begin to explain where they could make such massive savings, and they weren't going to really legislate to make it illegal to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, that's just unbelievably stupid. They're not that stupid, are they? No, David Cameron and George Osborne are sensible chaps underneath the laughable skin suits they wear, and the remaining Lib Dems will see they don't go through with this blazing idiocy.
If the Tories didn't expect to be implementing their manifesto as a whole, as we're told they didn't, then winning a majority put them in a happy conundrum. Do they now row back from the lunatic bribes they came up with, like selling off houses they don't so much as own on the cheap, or abolishing inheritance tax, breaking promises they never believed in to begin with? Or do they carry on regardless, as to not do so would be to aggravate the exact people, mainly the backbenchers, who did think the party meant it?
Well, now we have the answer. The strange thing is all the comment on the decision to "delay" abolishing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a mythical "British" Bill of Rights, which while always a completely stupid idea and utterly pointless without leaving the European Convention is not even close to the barking mad imbecility of the manifesto promises that were in the speech. That getting rid of the HRA is the one thing that seems to unite the disparate elements in the Commons, important as resisting such an act of vandalism is, says much of just what isn't going to face the same level of opposition. It has at least shown precisely how the Sun and Mail intend to play matters from here on out: again, not for them concerns about putting moron restrictions on tax, but rage at how they still won't get their way, having been principally responsible for the demonisation of the HRA. How dare the government they got elected snub them so?
As Rafael Behr wrote this morning, most Tories are taking their unexpected victory as proof both of just how brilliant they are and the uselessness of their opponents. This is hardly surprising when the SNP, declaring itself the unofficial opposition, isn't content with its 56 seats in Scotland and would rather like to force Alistair Carmichael into resigning for daring to leak something that portrayed poor wee Nicola Sturgeon in a less flattering light. In such circumstances are bad laws passed, not least when Labour as led by Harriet Harman is in such a supine, self-absorbed mood. Deciding not to oppose the EU referendum which is now coming like it or not is one thing; to not continue to oppose the cut in the benefit cap to £23,000 is quite another. Exceptional circumstances don't apparently mean anything to a party hierarchy convinced that it was not being quite harsh enough on those on benefits that did for them.
It's all the more dispiriting when there were quite so many breathtakingly awful laws proposed in the speech, including some that will directly target Labour. Not given a direct mention was the reintroduction of the redrawing of the constituency boundaries, destined to make a Labour majority even harder, although you can bet it will return at some stage. Instead the Tories made do with a surprise inserting into the proposed Trade Unions Bill of an opt-in system for the political fund element of union subscriptions, as clearly we can't have ordinary hard-working people funding parties, as opposed to the super-rich. The obscene hypocrisy of a government legislating to require strike ballots are supported by 40% of those eligible when it won only 36.9% of the vote meanwhile is chutzpah defined.
Then there's the clusterfuck of Home Office bills, including not just the "extremism" bill, introduced by David Cameron saying that no longer would government leave alone those who obey the law and the return of a supercharged communications bill destined to give the intelligence agencies total legal cover to do whatever the hell they like with our data, but also an overarching criminalisation of (il)legal highs. Only the government obviously can't call them that, and so has decided on "psychoactive substances" instead. I joked not so long back it would be easier if the government started declaring what was legal as opposed to illegal, and yet this is exactly what they are proposing to do. Yes, apparently under this new bill "any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect" will be made illegal, except for those it defines are legal. Older heads might be reminded of the difficulty government lawyers had in giving the police powers to shut down free parties, which led to the Criminal Justice Act of 94 defining in law the music being targeted as consisting of "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". It doesn't seem to have gotten through to our lawmakers the only reason the "legal high" market has flourished is precisely because of the illegality of and restrictions placed on the manufacture of MDMA and the rest, just as it didn't occur to them back in 94 that you'll never stop people from trying to enjoy themselves, but then what else is government for? Someone, I forget who, once said the Daily Mail owed its existence to the outrage some feel that others are out there having fun, and so the same could be said of so many of our politicians.
There is perhaps one worthwhile bill in the whole lot, and that's the childcare act. Except doubling the number of hours of free childcare available for three and four-year-olds looks certain to be giving with one hand and taking with the other, as tax credits will most likely be cut in the search for the £12bn from welfare. Which just reminds us this is only the beginning of 2 years of unrelenting misery, with George Osborne due to deliver his second budget of the year on July the 8th, setting out precisely how hard and fast we're going to be screwed. As someone I need to thank for yet again putting up with my shit recently said, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, our new overlords, politics, Queen's speech
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Tuesday, May 26, 2015
A return to May the 7th (and everything that's happened since).
Shallow like a line of piss / You're just a motherfucker
(Hello readers! This is rather long, as in 3,000 words long, but after two weeks of feeling sorry for myself you're hopefully ready to be bored stupid once again, right?)
Shall we, if we dare, return to May the 7th? Now, of course, we know that Labour's campaign was a disaster, Ed Miliband had spent 5 years making the party unelectable and that not a single member of the shadow cabinet believed in so much as a solitary policy in the manifesto. All these are now Facts, and cannot be disagreed with unless you are in Denial and clearly not on the side of the Modernisers blazing a trail towards a majority government in just another 5 short years.
Still, let's forget all that for a second while I relate two personal anecdotes that should have tipped me off that Labour was about to get fucked harder than a dead duck by a deranged and randy mallard. First, where I work the polling station is next door. When I got in someone had taken it upon themselves to stick up a laminated A4 sheet on the fence next to the building that said something along the lines of "All the main political parties have conspired to cover up child abuse in their ranks. Are you really going to vote for people who have connived in the rape of children?" Believer in free speech that I am, I swiftly binned it. Second, previously the polling station had been in the community centre opposite rather than in the sports club slightly up the road, confusing plenty of people. Thinking one young couple, the bloke expensively tatted up, were similarly perplexed, I advised them where the station was. "Oh, we're not voting", he scoffed, as though the idea was only slightly less ridiculous than if I'd suggested they perform a Manumission-style sex show right there in the street.
Except I put such bad omens out of my mind. If there was hope, it lay in the polls. How could they possibly be wrong? "It couldn't be closer" was the Graun's front page. "All the final polls so far seem to be showing a shift towards Labour", tweeted new king of psephology Lord Ashcroft, whose constituency polls implied Labour should romp home in the Tory marginals. Why, even Finchley and Golders Green looked possible for Labour. Everyone was preparing not for the unthinkable, a Tory majority, but the kind of result that could take weeks to unpick. Clearly it was serious if not just the Mail and Sun were descending into paroxysms of fear at how a Labour minority government might abolish non-dom status and tax mansions, but the editor of the Telegraph no less was making impassioned pleas in the middle of the night to readers signed up to receive marketing emails. The Tories were poised to declare Miliband illegitimate, Cameron was going to stay ensconced in Downing Street if the result was even remotely questionable, and saving Nick Clegg was deemed more important than some Tory target seats. More than anything I was cautiously optimistic. I'm never optimistic. Something was horrifically, spectacularly, cataclysmically wrong, and yet I failed to see the signs.
The clocks struck ten, David Dimbleby revealed the exit poll projection and Big Ben rang out death knells. Contrary to much that has been written since, the polls were only fantastically wrong on a single score. The 37% Tory share was just about within the 3% margin of error of most of them. They got the Lib Dem, UKIP and SNP shares more or less on the nose too. Only on Labour's dismal, catastrophic 31% (or 30.4%, if we're being precise) did they not manage to get close to just how short Ed Miliband's party was going to fall. Everything had been predicated on the polls being right; the parties since have claimed they either had an inkling or knew the Labour vote was being hideously overstated, but if that's really true they didn't share their insight with anyone, not least the same journalists they spend much of their time leaking to. The failure was pretty much total, even if at their most pessimistic/optimistic the leaders had imagined just such a scenario.
How were the polls so wrong? At this stage, you can still take your pick. Probably the best indication so far nonetheless is the breakdown by ICM of their final poll for the Graun, which shows that rather than it being down to a late swing or "shy" Tories, both two of the most immediately popular explanations, including from myself, it's more likely the problem is the sampling. The raw data for the poll, before the weighting was applied designed to counteract the shy Tory phenomenon blamed for 92's debacle, had Labour and the Tories neck and neck on 35%. Indeed, it was the demographic weighting that did the most damage, boosting Labour up to 38% and the Tories down to 32%, before the subsequent weighting for past vote, turnout and adjustment for those who refuse to say who they're going to vote for now but will say who they did last time brought the figures back to 35% for Labour and 34% for the Tories.
In other words, the best explanation we have thus far is polling, whether on the internet or by telephone, isn't able to reach the people necessary to produce a representative sample, and that unrepresentative sample is then made even worse by weighting that either needs fundamentally reconfiguring or ripping up and starting again. This doesn't mean there wasn't something of a late swing, or still some shy Tories, as the exit poll also underestimated the number of seats the Tories would win, but neither can plausibly explain just how massively out of whack the Tory and Labour share of the votes were.
We must then return to my personal anecdotes, as frankly we have little else. First, there's an awful lot of people out there who aren't apathetic so much as apoplectic at a political elite that doesn't in fact exist. Yes, it probably was just a lone nutbar who stuck that sign up, and yet that person spoke for a lot of others who believe the absolute worst of what they read in the papers. There has yet to be the slightest evidence presented there was anything like a cover-up of child abuse at Westminster, as opposed to the possibility there was a lot of looking in the opposite direction, as we've seen in places like Rotherham for varying reasons, and already people are convinced of the depravity of those in high places.
Second, and much more fundamentally, is the failure of Labour and the left in general to get out the youth vote. Estimates vary as to how many 18-24 year-olds did turn out: a poll with a 9,000 strong sample for Ipsos-Mori suggests it could have been as low as 43%, which sounds far more realistic than the British Election Society's estimate of 60%, which was still below YouGov's "certain to vote" 69%. When less than half of those with arguably the most at stake couldn't be motivated enough to do something that only needs doing once every 5 years, there encapsulated is why we now have the Conservatives with a majority. Yes, you can blame wannabe messiahs, the vacuous stupidity of youth culture, if not the young themselves, the failure to counteract the they're all the same fatuity, which among the older saw the UKIP vote skyrocket, the fatheaded selfishness of a distinct minority and all the rest of it, but if you can't convince 18-24-year-olds to vote for something better than the whitest, most middle class bloke on the face of the planet, then frankly you deserve what you get.
Finally, and interconnectedly, we have the Tory everything we do must be for the retiring boomers philosophy. So much of the talk since the election has been about how the Tories won because of how they were on the side of the aspirational, weren't going to tar and feather entrepreneurs in town centres or tax the rabbit hutches of children in central London, most of which has been from the Labour leadership challengers and other assorted "modernisers". Bullshit. The Tories won because they dedicated so much time and energy to keeping their core vote on side, with every ploy and bung going. Hate inheritance tax? We're abolishing it. Want to be certain we won't do anything to your benefits, although we certainly will to those of the low-paid and in-work? Triple locked. Want to blow your pension all in one go if you so wish, or buy a flat or two and then rent them out to the brats you spawned to replace yourselves? Already done. Want to generally fuck over everyone younger than you, which is funny because you don't know them? Hey, that was the entire point of our manifesto. Welcome aboard. We, or at least I said this is going to be no country for young men, and lo, so it did come to pass.
Labour did not lose on the basis of the manifesto. The manifesto lacked passion, anger and failed to radiate strength, but it didn't want for policies which were popular, or at least the polls at the time said they were. Labour lost because of the above, and a few other distinct reasons. Ed Miliband, much as I came to love the rubber faced goon as only another sad, lonely weirdo can, just wasn't seen as prime ministerial. He faced a mountain and only began to scale it when it was too late to reach the summit. I thought the Paxman interview, when he replied with his defiant and yet sympathetic "who cares?" to how he was presented in the media, along with his refusal to play the referendum game in the Question Time debate were the kind of answers that won people over, not necessarily because they liked or agreed with what he said but because they could respect him for doing so. Almost certainly more damaging and what everyone else saw was the battering he received on the same show for "overspending", even if those assailing him were Tory stooges, as at least two were. Labour lost because it wasn't trusted on the economy. The party that brought the economy back from the brink, only for George Osborne to push it over the edge with his austerity programme, took the blame over and over for something it didn't do.
By the same token, the Conservatives did not win on the basis of their dismal, hate-filled manifesto. They won because David Cameron, as essentially David Cameron was the Conservative campaign, was seen as more plausible. He spent one half of it going through the motions and then the second half trying to convince everyone just how "up 4 it" he was, talking to empty cowsheds and specially chosen farmers about where milk comes from, and yet it was enough. George Osborne meanwhile was kept as far away from voters as possible, doing work experience at various businesses presumably as part of community payback for stalling the recovery, while all the other favourites who have since returned to our screens and newspapers like Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and Theresa May were locked away entirely lest they scare the horses.
And you know why else? Because let's face it, there are a substantial minority of people in this country who aren't just ignorant cunts, they are proud and positively revel in being horrible, ignorant cunts. I don't mean in the oh, people who don't vote Labour are ignorant sense, as that itself is completely ignorant. What is ignorant is the increasing tendency on the part of very intelligent people to do themselves down on the basis that they don't talk what the common people do like. Oh, they're not like us, they don't talk like us goes the wail from people who are in fact mostly very well represented, they don't understand the life of the everyday man, when they very much do and most politicians spend far too much time if anything trying to understand exactly what Mr and Mrs Average Voter want at any precise moment in time.
We seem to have reached a point where it's increasingly seen as snobbish to use words longer than three syllables, or indeed any word that your average 8-year-old doesn't use everyday, as ordinary people don't talk like that any more. No, perhaps they don't. Then again, to a lot of ordinary people it's perfectly normal to use a variation on fuck in every sentence, and excuse me if I'd rather our politicians didn't emulate that trait. This ignorance doesn't always but often does go hand in hand with the they're all the same cuntery, and rather than fight against this bigotry of low expectations, low aspirations (yes, because that's what this is) and low everything, we in fact have everyone wanting a bit of it.
Something else some otherwise very intelligent people took from the election results was, well, at least the BNP got about ten votes. Why was that? It couldn't be down to how we now have a party that says yes, it's perfectly OK to be ignorant, insular and proud of it, could it? The fascist vote collapsed precisely because in UKIP there's a home for them where they don't quite feel the same level of self-hatred, nor is the media as visceral in its distaste; if anything, quite the opposite, such is the hard-on they've had for Nigel Farage if not his party as a whole. Not every UKIP voter fits this depiction, of course; many of those who voted UKIP in Labour's heartlands in the north for instance did so as a protest, out of a sense of being ignored and abandoned. All the same, many of those who did vote UKIP are hateful pricks, and if anything considering just how much of popular culture is currently dedicated to uncovering "the other" and then wiping their faces in their own vomit, it's a surprise "only" 4 million joined the Farage bandwagon.
Lastly, *gasp*, we have to consider the sheer horror that has been the Labour leadership contest thus far. Within 24 hours the manifesto had been abandoned, disowned, insulted, shat upon, as had Ed. Looking at Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, and all the other wastes of flesh that frankly don't deserve to be referred to by name, I cannot see a single thing that I should care about or ever want to believe in. Who knows exactly what it was that caused Chuka Umunna to drop out before the contest had even begun, whether it really was he wasn't ready for his friends and relatives to be dropped into the media maelstrom, or if he was about to be exposed as a dog botherer, as it doesn't really matter which. That he couldn't face up to it just shows what a bottler party Labour now is, and the lack of empathy it has for those who do take on the worst that can be thrown at them.
Ed Miliband spent 5 years having every little bit of shit that could be found directed straight back into his face. The surprise if anything was that by the election campaign, everything had been used already. There was nothing left. Ed's reward for having chosen to do things the difficult way? For his entire leadership to be treated as something that couldn't be repudiated fast enough. I know it's not just about his electoral failure but also how his leadership was long viewed within the party, with no one prepared to stand against him for fear it would make things worse, and yet he still deserved, deserves far better. Indeed, I challenge anyone to seriously tell me how any of the current line up will be a better leader, or any more capable of winning the next election. Rather than take a good hard look at where Labour has gone wrong across the UK, from Scotland where it certainly didn't lose because it was too left-wing, as John Curtice among many others have argued, to the north where the threat to the party is not the Conservatives but UKIP, to the cities were the problem the party faces is defectors to the left, the party is still, still, obsessed with how the right-wing media depicts it rather than how real people in the marginals weren't convinced.
Labour is haunted by the spectre of Tony Blair, despite the bastard being very much alive. The party doesn't seem to have realised we aren't in the 90s/early 00s any longer, where triangulation worked so long as the media was kept (somewhat) on side and the economy grew. We're in the 2010s, wages are still barely growing, only the luckiest among the young can afford to "aspire", and the previously dominant centre-left parties of Europe are in crisis. And yet all we're being offered is reheated, regurgitated, reconstituted processed mechanical bullshit of the most shameful quality from meatheads who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. John Harris said it best: most of the Labour elite simply don't have the wit or humility to involve themselves in the debates that are necessary at the margins, that are outside of the comfort zone of consoling themselves with it's all down to how the party wasn't on the side of hard-working people and hard-working families and hard-working wealth creators and hard-working businesses.
It wasn't just despair over the election result and other things that led me to take a two-week break, and I apologise sincerely if anyone was truly worried for my wellbeing. I was for a while too, but the worst has passed, thankfully. It was despair over where I, we go from here: I've never been a Labour party member and I very much doubt I ever will be. And yet Ed Miliband's Labour had convinced me we were getting somewhere; yes, it was barely anywhere, but for once Polly Toynbee has it right in how different a Labour Queen's speech tomorrow would have been to the Tory one we'll get. Labour at this moment in time looks finished, and Labour in the UK is the only leftish party that has ever won, may ever win power. How do we begin to build a movement that can replace it, that can have that wide-ranging appeal, that can offer the despondent hope and the hopeful a better alternative? How can I change anything when I can't even change myself?
I see the parts but not the whole / I study saints and scholars both / No perfect plan unfurls
(Hello readers! This is rather long, as in 3,000 words long, but after two weeks of feeling sorry for myself you're hopefully ready to be bored stupid once again, right?)
Shall we, if we dare, return to May the 7th? Now, of course, we know that Labour's campaign was a disaster, Ed Miliband had spent 5 years making the party unelectable and that not a single member of the shadow cabinet believed in so much as a solitary policy in the manifesto. All these are now Facts, and cannot be disagreed with unless you are in Denial and clearly not on the side of the Modernisers blazing a trail towards a majority government in just another 5 short years.
Still, let's forget all that for a second while I relate two personal anecdotes that should have tipped me off that Labour was about to get fucked harder than a dead duck by a deranged and randy mallard. First, where I work the polling station is next door. When I got in someone had taken it upon themselves to stick up a laminated A4 sheet on the fence next to the building that said something along the lines of "All the main political parties have conspired to cover up child abuse in their ranks. Are you really going to vote for people who have connived in the rape of children?" Believer in free speech that I am, I swiftly binned it. Second, previously the polling station had been in the community centre opposite rather than in the sports club slightly up the road, confusing plenty of people. Thinking one young couple, the bloke expensively tatted up, were similarly perplexed, I advised them where the station was. "Oh, we're not voting", he scoffed, as though the idea was only slightly less ridiculous than if I'd suggested they perform a Manumission-style sex show right there in the street.
Except I put such bad omens out of my mind. If there was hope, it lay in the polls. How could they possibly be wrong? "It couldn't be closer" was the Graun's front page. "All the final polls so far seem to be showing a shift towards Labour", tweeted new king of psephology Lord Ashcroft, whose constituency polls implied Labour should romp home in the Tory marginals. Why, even Finchley and Golders Green looked possible for Labour. Everyone was preparing not for the unthinkable, a Tory majority, but the kind of result that could take weeks to unpick. Clearly it was serious if not just the Mail and Sun were descending into paroxysms of fear at how a Labour minority government might abolish non-dom status and tax mansions, but the editor of the Telegraph no less was making impassioned pleas in the middle of the night to readers signed up to receive marketing emails. The Tories were poised to declare Miliband illegitimate, Cameron was going to stay ensconced in Downing Street if the result was even remotely questionable, and saving Nick Clegg was deemed more important than some Tory target seats. More than anything I was cautiously optimistic. I'm never optimistic. Something was horrifically, spectacularly, cataclysmically wrong, and yet I failed to see the signs.
The clocks struck ten, David Dimbleby revealed the exit poll projection and Big Ben rang out death knells. Contrary to much that has been written since, the polls were only fantastically wrong on a single score. The 37% Tory share was just about within the 3% margin of error of most of them. They got the Lib Dem, UKIP and SNP shares more or less on the nose too. Only on Labour's dismal, catastrophic 31% (or 30.4%, if we're being precise) did they not manage to get close to just how short Ed Miliband's party was going to fall. Everything had been predicated on the polls being right; the parties since have claimed they either had an inkling or knew the Labour vote was being hideously overstated, but if that's really true they didn't share their insight with anyone, not least the same journalists they spend much of their time leaking to. The failure was pretty much total, even if at their most pessimistic/optimistic the leaders had imagined just such a scenario.
How were the polls so wrong? At this stage, you can still take your pick. Probably the best indication so far nonetheless is the breakdown by ICM of their final poll for the Graun, which shows that rather than it being down to a late swing or "shy" Tories, both two of the most immediately popular explanations, including from myself, it's more likely the problem is the sampling. The raw data for the poll, before the weighting was applied designed to counteract the shy Tory phenomenon blamed for 92's debacle, had Labour and the Tories neck and neck on 35%. Indeed, it was the demographic weighting that did the most damage, boosting Labour up to 38% and the Tories down to 32%, before the subsequent weighting for past vote, turnout and adjustment for those who refuse to say who they're going to vote for now but will say who they did last time brought the figures back to 35% for Labour and 34% for the Tories.
In other words, the best explanation we have thus far is polling, whether on the internet or by telephone, isn't able to reach the people necessary to produce a representative sample, and that unrepresentative sample is then made even worse by weighting that either needs fundamentally reconfiguring or ripping up and starting again. This doesn't mean there wasn't something of a late swing, or still some shy Tories, as the exit poll also underestimated the number of seats the Tories would win, but neither can plausibly explain just how massively out of whack the Tory and Labour share of the votes were.
We must then return to my personal anecdotes, as frankly we have little else. First, there's an awful lot of people out there who aren't apathetic so much as apoplectic at a political elite that doesn't in fact exist. Yes, it probably was just a lone nutbar who stuck that sign up, and yet that person spoke for a lot of others who believe the absolute worst of what they read in the papers. There has yet to be the slightest evidence presented there was anything like a cover-up of child abuse at Westminster, as opposed to the possibility there was a lot of looking in the opposite direction, as we've seen in places like Rotherham for varying reasons, and already people are convinced of the depravity of those in high places.
Second, and much more fundamentally, is the failure of Labour and the left in general to get out the youth vote. Estimates vary as to how many 18-24 year-olds did turn out: a poll with a 9,000 strong sample for Ipsos-Mori suggests it could have been as low as 43%, which sounds far more realistic than the British Election Society's estimate of 60%, which was still below YouGov's "certain to vote" 69%. When less than half of those with arguably the most at stake couldn't be motivated enough to do something that only needs doing once every 5 years, there encapsulated is why we now have the Conservatives with a majority. Yes, you can blame wannabe messiahs, the vacuous stupidity of youth culture, if not the young themselves, the failure to counteract the they're all the same fatuity, which among the older saw the UKIP vote skyrocket, the fatheaded selfishness of a distinct minority and all the rest of it, but if you can't convince 18-24-year-olds to vote for something better than the whitest, most middle class bloke on the face of the planet, then frankly you deserve what you get.
Finally, and interconnectedly, we have the Tory everything we do must be for the retiring boomers philosophy. So much of the talk since the election has been about how the Tories won because of how they were on the side of the aspirational, weren't going to tar and feather entrepreneurs in town centres or tax the rabbit hutches of children in central London, most of which has been from the Labour leadership challengers and other assorted "modernisers". Bullshit. The Tories won because they dedicated so much time and energy to keeping their core vote on side, with every ploy and bung going. Hate inheritance tax? We're abolishing it. Want to be certain we won't do anything to your benefits, although we certainly will to those of the low-paid and in-work? Triple locked. Want to blow your pension all in one go if you so wish, or buy a flat or two and then rent them out to the brats you spawned to replace yourselves? Already done. Want to generally fuck over everyone younger than you, which is funny because you don't know them? Hey, that was the entire point of our manifesto. Welcome aboard. We, or at least I said this is going to be no country for young men, and lo, so it did come to pass.
Labour did not lose on the basis of the manifesto. The manifesto lacked passion, anger and failed to radiate strength, but it didn't want for policies which were popular, or at least the polls at the time said they were. Labour lost because of the above, and a few other distinct reasons. Ed Miliband, much as I came to love the rubber faced goon as only another sad, lonely weirdo can, just wasn't seen as prime ministerial. He faced a mountain and only began to scale it when it was too late to reach the summit. I thought the Paxman interview, when he replied with his defiant and yet sympathetic "who cares?" to how he was presented in the media, along with his refusal to play the referendum game in the Question Time debate were the kind of answers that won people over, not necessarily because they liked or agreed with what he said but because they could respect him for doing so. Almost certainly more damaging and what everyone else saw was the battering he received on the same show for "overspending", even if those assailing him were Tory stooges, as at least two were. Labour lost because it wasn't trusted on the economy. The party that brought the economy back from the brink, only for George Osborne to push it over the edge with his austerity programme, took the blame over and over for something it didn't do.
By the same token, the Conservatives did not win on the basis of their dismal, hate-filled manifesto. They won because David Cameron, as essentially David Cameron was the Conservative campaign, was seen as more plausible. He spent one half of it going through the motions and then the second half trying to convince everyone just how "up 4 it" he was, talking to empty cowsheds and specially chosen farmers about where milk comes from, and yet it was enough. George Osborne meanwhile was kept as far away from voters as possible, doing work experience at various businesses presumably as part of community payback for stalling the recovery, while all the other favourites who have since returned to our screens and newspapers like Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and Theresa May were locked away entirely lest they scare the horses.
And you know why else? Because let's face it, there are a substantial minority of people in this country who aren't just ignorant cunts, they are proud and positively revel in being horrible, ignorant cunts. I don't mean in the oh, people who don't vote Labour are ignorant sense, as that itself is completely ignorant. What is ignorant is the increasing tendency on the part of very intelligent people to do themselves down on the basis that they don't talk what the common people do like. Oh, they're not like us, they don't talk like us goes the wail from people who are in fact mostly very well represented, they don't understand the life of the everyday man, when they very much do and most politicians spend far too much time if anything trying to understand exactly what Mr and Mrs Average Voter want at any precise moment in time.
We seem to have reached a point where it's increasingly seen as snobbish to use words longer than three syllables, or indeed any word that your average 8-year-old doesn't use everyday, as ordinary people don't talk like that any more. No, perhaps they don't. Then again, to a lot of ordinary people it's perfectly normal to use a variation on fuck in every sentence, and excuse me if I'd rather our politicians didn't emulate that trait. This ignorance doesn't always but often does go hand in hand with the they're all the same cuntery, and rather than fight against this bigotry of low expectations, low aspirations (yes, because that's what this is) and low everything, we in fact have everyone wanting a bit of it.
Something else some otherwise very intelligent people took from the election results was, well, at least the BNP got about ten votes. Why was that? It couldn't be down to how we now have a party that says yes, it's perfectly OK to be ignorant, insular and proud of it, could it? The fascist vote collapsed precisely because in UKIP there's a home for them where they don't quite feel the same level of self-hatred, nor is the media as visceral in its distaste; if anything, quite the opposite, such is the hard-on they've had for Nigel Farage if not his party as a whole. Not every UKIP voter fits this depiction, of course; many of those who voted UKIP in Labour's heartlands in the north for instance did so as a protest, out of a sense of being ignored and abandoned. All the same, many of those who did vote UKIP are hateful pricks, and if anything considering just how much of popular culture is currently dedicated to uncovering "the other" and then wiping their faces in their own vomit, it's a surprise "only" 4 million joined the Farage bandwagon.
Lastly, *gasp*, we have to consider the sheer horror that has been the Labour leadership contest thus far. Within 24 hours the manifesto had been abandoned, disowned, insulted, shat upon, as had Ed. Looking at Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, and all the other wastes of flesh that frankly don't deserve to be referred to by name, I cannot see a single thing that I should care about or ever want to believe in. Who knows exactly what it was that caused Chuka Umunna to drop out before the contest had even begun, whether it really was he wasn't ready for his friends and relatives to be dropped into the media maelstrom, or if he was about to be exposed as a dog botherer, as it doesn't really matter which. That he couldn't face up to it just shows what a bottler party Labour now is, and the lack of empathy it has for those who do take on the worst that can be thrown at them.
Ed Miliband spent 5 years having every little bit of shit that could be found directed straight back into his face. The surprise if anything was that by the election campaign, everything had been used already. There was nothing left. Ed's reward for having chosen to do things the difficult way? For his entire leadership to be treated as something that couldn't be repudiated fast enough. I know it's not just about his electoral failure but also how his leadership was long viewed within the party, with no one prepared to stand against him for fear it would make things worse, and yet he still deserved, deserves far better. Indeed, I challenge anyone to seriously tell me how any of the current line up will be a better leader, or any more capable of winning the next election. Rather than take a good hard look at where Labour has gone wrong across the UK, from Scotland where it certainly didn't lose because it was too left-wing, as John Curtice among many others have argued, to the north where the threat to the party is not the Conservatives but UKIP, to the cities were the problem the party faces is defectors to the left, the party is still, still, obsessed with how the right-wing media depicts it rather than how real people in the marginals weren't convinced.
Labour is haunted by the spectre of Tony Blair, despite the bastard being very much alive. The party doesn't seem to have realised we aren't in the 90s/early 00s any longer, where triangulation worked so long as the media was kept (somewhat) on side and the economy grew. We're in the 2010s, wages are still barely growing, only the luckiest among the young can afford to "aspire", and the previously dominant centre-left parties of Europe are in crisis. And yet all we're being offered is reheated, regurgitated, reconstituted processed mechanical bullshit of the most shameful quality from meatheads who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. John Harris said it best: most of the Labour elite simply don't have the wit or humility to involve themselves in the debates that are necessary at the margins, that are outside of the comfort zone of consoling themselves with it's all down to how the party wasn't on the side of hard-working people and hard-working families and hard-working wealth creators and hard-working businesses.
It wasn't just despair over the election result and other things that led me to take a two-week break, and I apologise sincerely if anyone was truly worried for my wellbeing. I was for a while too, but the worst has passed, thankfully. It was despair over where I, we go from here: I've never been a Labour party member and I very much doubt I ever will be. And yet Ed Miliband's Labour had convinced me we were getting somewhere; yes, it was barely anywhere, but for once Polly Toynbee has it right in how different a Labour Queen's speech tomorrow would have been to the Tory one we'll get. Labour at this moment in time looks finished, and Labour in the UK is the only leftish party that has ever won, may ever win power. How do we begin to build a movement that can replace it, that can have that wide-ranging appeal, that can offer the despondent hope and the hopeful a better alternative? How can I change anything when I can't even change myself?
I see the parts but not the whole / I study saints and scholars both / No perfect plan unfurls
Labels: elections 2015, politics, we're all doomed
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Saturday, May 09, 2015
.
Ever have one of those days where, regardless of anything else that was happening, you should have done everything differently?
Yesterday was one of those days. And to be truthful, I don't just mean yesterday. I mean every single day of my life since I was oh, 13, just to put a figure on it. 17 years later and I still haven't learned a thing.
Yesterday was one of those days. And to be truthful, I don't just mean yesterday. I mean every single day of my life since I was oh, 13, just to put a figure on it. 17 years later and I still haven't learned a thing.
Friday, May 08, 2015
Acedia's blackest hole.
Where do we even begin?
Perhaps it's best to start with what I and so many others got spectacularly wrong. First, the Lynton Crosby "crossover" happened. It happened at the very last minute, but it happened. Second, the mainstream, overwhelmingly right-wing media has far more influence than anyone on the left or on the internet as a whole has given it credit for in years. Their screeching appeals to their readers not to vote Labour over the past couple of days are almost certainly not the reason the Conservatives have a slender majority, but the months, years of attacks on Labour and their depiction of Ed Miliband as a mixture of Stalin and Mr Bean, to borrow from Vince Cable, have exacted a heavy toll. If you want a reason why UKIP won just shy of 4 million votes, almost as many as the SNP and the Lib Dems combined, you need only look as far as a media that depicts Britain as a country where the power lies not with the white, upper middle classes but with immigrants, benefit claimants, the EU, and a constantly being bent over and sodomised BBC. The real metropolitan elite has succeeded in creating an image of a phony metropolitan elite, where politically correct limp-wristed Guardianistas allow children to be raped and everything that's wrong with the country is down to their smug, sneering attitude of knowing best. You can't support England! You can't talk about immigration! You can't say anything anymore without someone jumping down your throat!
Where I would maintain I wasn't wrong is in that no one won this election. Now, plainly, the Conservatives did. They didn't however win on the basis of anything in the Conservative manifesto or almost anything that David Cameron said the whole campaign. The Tories have increased their share of the vote yes, something not achieved since 1900, but the swing is a miniscule 0.5%. The Conservatives won because at the last minute more decided to stick with what they know than risk a Labour minority "held to ransom" by the SNP. Apart from a few exceptional results, like the defenestration of Ed Balls, the Tories have their majority thanks to winning the seats they needed to from their former coalition partner. Nick Clegg's message of dead centrism, which even to me looked as if it might in the end pay dividends failed catastrophically. Why have a Lib Dem MP supporting Tory policies when you can have the real thing?
The Labour result is though throat-slittingly, jumping into a gaping chasm, blowing your own head off with a howitzer bad. It represents everything the party must have feared in its darkest moments combined with the very worst of its most gleeful enemies' fantasies. To gain an overall swing of just 1.5% after 5 years of austerity, real terms losses in earnings and hacking away at the public services as only a Tory led government can is not just nightmarish, it suggests Labour as a party is in terminal decline. As we've seen on the continent, it isn't the centre-right parties that have been most squeezed post-crash, it's been those on the centre-left. Unlike in Spain and Greece where parties of the radical left have been the beneficiaries of the collapse, we're seeing a refracted image of the situation in France, where the Front National looks set to become the unofficial opposition. Clearly UKIP aren't going to play that role here, but what has happened is that as all the main parties have moved to the right on immigration and the economy, it's the establishment parties of the left that suffer most. As the Greens will never be a working class alternative to Labour for a whole myriad of reasons, the major shift has been to UKIP, but there has been a much smaller if still significant shift to the left also.
How is Labour meant to win those voters back? The more hawkish it is on the deficit and the harsher on immigration the more it loses voters like me to the alternatives on the left. Meanwhile those on the right aren't satisfied as Labour won't go further than merely copying Tory policies. It's utterly stuck, and has next to no room to manoeuvre.
For the left to win, it seems the only hope is to have a charismatic leader. They can be an utter bastard, like a certain Mr Blair, or they can be a sign of change rather than stand for anything, like a certain Mr Obama. If you look slightly nerdy, decide that you'd rather than country was just a little bit more equal please sir, and that it's not the best idea in the world to chuck bombs at countries without thinking it through first, or to spend the whole of your life brown nosing some of the most despicable cunts on the face of the planet, then boy are you fucked.
Ed Miliband's gambit was that the country had on a few really quite slight measures shifted all but imperceptibly to the left. In their heart of hearts, perhaps most people do feel that way: they do want a higher minimum wage if not a living one, they do want a job that provides a way out of poverty, which is secure, they do want the corporate behemoths that now run so much of our public services to be just that, rather than service only their shareholders. When it came down to it though, they held onto nurse in case of something worse, the worse being an inconclusive result where a nationalist party set on breaking the country up would hold the balance of power. Yes, the failure to correct or challenge the media/Tory narrative that Labour was responsible for the crash did have an impact, but then on so many other fronts Labour and indeed all the parties have failed to do the same. For far too long the main three have been too scared to confront voters' prejudices and instead have given in to them. You celebrate the way the country has become diverse and yet you tell us you want an end to immigration right now; you tell us you hate scroungers and yet the welfare bill is increasing because benefits are topping up low wages and subsidising landlords, not to pay for layabouts; you complain about the wait to see a doctor and the threat to the NHS, and yet you're not prepared to pay the taxes to fund it to the same level as health services elsewhere.
Who Labour should choose to replace Miliband seems almost moot. It clearly can't be someone else from the Blair/Brown era, which rules out Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham at a stroke. Chuka Umuuna would, should be a frontrunner but while he has steel he lacks said charisma and passion. I'd like to think it's time the party chose a woman, and on that front Liz Kendall would probably be the best bet, only yet again there's no reason whatsoever to believe she would make the needed difference when there is so little scope for policy change without losing more voters to UKIP or the Greens. If there is the tiniest, most minute squib of brightness, it's that nothing can possibly get worse for the party in Scotland. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but it can't get any worse. Whether Scotland will still be part of the UK by the time it's ready to challenge again could be the real question.
Finally then we must turn to our new overlords. The Conservatives have won a majority, regardless of how, on the back of the most right-wing manifesto since the days of Thatcher. They promise to rip up the Human Rights Act, if only to replace it with a British Bill of Rights codifying the same things, to slash social security to the absolute bone in ways they refused to let us in on, to further ramp up the housing market, to all but abolish inheritance tax, and to run a surplus from which tax cuts in time for the next election will be handed out. Let's surmise that in fact it won't be that bad: Osborne will now look at the books, realise that cutting as much as they say they will is complete lunacy, and that a further delay to reducing the deficit is sensible. We still though will be facing cuts that look unachievable, if that is the party doesn't now renege on its promise to not raise VAT, to posit just one thing it could do instead.
As promised by Cameron, the starting gun on the EU referendum has sounded. Let's assume the best: that Cameron gets something from Angela Merkel and the rest that allows him to claim he has successfully renegotiated our membership. Regardless of that, his backbenchers, looking over their shoulders at UKIP once again will be campaigning for the exit. The poll will not be about the benefits of the EU so much as what are seen as the negatives: the open borders, the loss of power, the amount we pay for barmy EU bureaucrats, and so forth. Even if the vote is a yes to stay in, the Scottish referendum has proved that once you've asked the question you will sooner or later have to ask it again, as it's guaranteed the result will be as close as the 55%-45% share north of the border.
Then we have the issue of Cameron himself. We know he's not going to serve a third term, so the party leadership battle begins here. At the same time as the EU referendum we're going to have Osborne, May and Boris battling it out, with all that implies for infighting in the party in and around the referendum. When you've won a majority on the back of being right-wing shitbags and those whose support you're trying to get are right-wing shitbags, why on earth would you then head back to the centre?
I could go on but that's probably enough and I'm sleep deprived as it is. To be slightly optimistic again, the Tories are still going to have trouble governing: their majority is smaller than it was in 1992, their backbenchers will be just as fractious as in the last parliament, and by-elections will dwindle it further.
Let's not lie to ourselves, all the same. Today's result is a disaster for those at the margins of society. It's a disaster for those who believe in internationalism, rather than nationalism. And it's the evidence we should have seen before that the left in England is fucked, probably irrevocably.
Have a good weekend.
Perhaps it's best to start with what I and so many others got spectacularly wrong. First, the Lynton Crosby "crossover" happened. It happened at the very last minute, but it happened. Second, the mainstream, overwhelmingly right-wing media has far more influence than anyone on the left or on the internet as a whole has given it credit for in years. Their screeching appeals to their readers not to vote Labour over the past couple of days are almost certainly not the reason the Conservatives have a slender majority, but the months, years of attacks on Labour and their depiction of Ed Miliband as a mixture of Stalin and Mr Bean, to borrow from Vince Cable, have exacted a heavy toll. If you want a reason why UKIP won just shy of 4 million votes, almost as many as the SNP and the Lib Dems combined, you need only look as far as a media that depicts Britain as a country where the power lies not with the white, upper middle classes but with immigrants, benefit claimants, the EU, and a constantly being bent over and sodomised BBC. The real metropolitan elite has succeeded in creating an image of a phony metropolitan elite, where politically correct limp-wristed Guardianistas allow children to be raped and everything that's wrong with the country is down to their smug, sneering attitude of knowing best. You can't support England! You can't talk about immigration! You can't say anything anymore without someone jumping down your throat!
Where I would maintain I wasn't wrong is in that no one won this election. Now, plainly, the Conservatives did. They didn't however win on the basis of anything in the Conservative manifesto or almost anything that David Cameron said the whole campaign. The Tories have increased their share of the vote yes, something not achieved since 1900, but the swing is a miniscule 0.5%. The Conservatives won because at the last minute more decided to stick with what they know than risk a Labour minority "held to ransom" by the SNP. Apart from a few exceptional results, like the defenestration of Ed Balls, the Tories have their majority thanks to winning the seats they needed to from their former coalition partner. Nick Clegg's message of dead centrism, which even to me looked as if it might in the end pay dividends failed catastrophically. Why have a Lib Dem MP supporting Tory policies when you can have the real thing?
The Labour result is though throat-slittingly, jumping into a gaping chasm, blowing your own head off with a howitzer bad. It represents everything the party must have feared in its darkest moments combined with the very worst of its most gleeful enemies' fantasies. To gain an overall swing of just 1.5% after 5 years of austerity, real terms losses in earnings and hacking away at the public services as only a Tory led government can is not just nightmarish, it suggests Labour as a party is in terminal decline. As we've seen on the continent, it isn't the centre-right parties that have been most squeezed post-crash, it's been those on the centre-left. Unlike in Spain and Greece where parties of the radical left have been the beneficiaries of the collapse, we're seeing a refracted image of the situation in France, where the Front National looks set to become the unofficial opposition. Clearly UKIP aren't going to play that role here, but what has happened is that as all the main parties have moved to the right on immigration and the economy, it's the establishment parties of the left that suffer most. As the Greens will never be a working class alternative to Labour for a whole myriad of reasons, the major shift has been to UKIP, but there has been a much smaller if still significant shift to the left also.
How is Labour meant to win those voters back? The more hawkish it is on the deficit and the harsher on immigration the more it loses voters like me to the alternatives on the left. Meanwhile those on the right aren't satisfied as Labour won't go further than merely copying Tory policies. It's utterly stuck, and has next to no room to manoeuvre.
For the left to win, it seems the only hope is to have a charismatic leader. They can be an utter bastard, like a certain Mr Blair, or they can be a sign of change rather than stand for anything, like a certain Mr Obama. If you look slightly nerdy, decide that you'd rather than country was just a little bit more equal please sir, and that it's not the best idea in the world to chuck bombs at countries without thinking it through first, or to spend the whole of your life brown nosing some of the most despicable cunts on the face of the planet, then boy are you fucked.
Ed Miliband's gambit was that the country had on a few really quite slight measures shifted all but imperceptibly to the left. In their heart of hearts, perhaps most people do feel that way: they do want a higher minimum wage if not a living one, they do want a job that provides a way out of poverty, which is secure, they do want the corporate behemoths that now run so much of our public services to be just that, rather than service only their shareholders. When it came down to it though, they held onto nurse in case of something worse, the worse being an inconclusive result where a nationalist party set on breaking the country up would hold the balance of power. Yes, the failure to correct or challenge the media/Tory narrative that Labour was responsible for the crash did have an impact, but then on so many other fronts Labour and indeed all the parties have failed to do the same. For far too long the main three have been too scared to confront voters' prejudices and instead have given in to them. You celebrate the way the country has become diverse and yet you tell us you want an end to immigration right now; you tell us you hate scroungers and yet the welfare bill is increasing because benefits are topping up low wages and subsidising landlords, not to pay for layabouts; you complain about the wait to see a doctor and the threat to the NHS, and yet you're not prepared to pay the taxes to fund it to the same level as health services elsewhere.
Who Labour should choose to replace Miliband seems almost moot. It clearly can't be someone else from the Blair/Brown era, which rules out Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham at a stroke. Chuka Umuuna would, should be a frontrunner but while he has steel he lacks said charisma and passion. I'd like to think it's time the party chose a woman, and on that front Liz Kendall would probably be the best bet, only yet again there's no reason whatsoever to believe she would make the needed difference when there is so little scope for policy change without losing more voters to UKIP or the Greens. If there is the tiniest, most minute squib of brightness, it's that nothing can possibly get worse for the party in Scotland. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but it can't get any worse. Whether Scotland will still be part of the UK by the time it's ready to challenge again could be the real question.
Finally then we must turn to our new overlords. The Conservatives have won a majority, regardless of how, on the back of the most right-wing manifesto since the days of Thatcher. They promise to rip up the Human Rights Act, if only to replace it with a British Bill of Rights codifying the same things, to slash social security to the absolute bone in ways they refused to let us in on, to further ramp up the housing market, to all but abolish inheritance tax, and to run a surplus from which tax cuts in time for the next election will be handed out. Let's surmise that in fact it won't be that bad: Osborne will now look at the books, realise that cutting as much as they say they will is complete lunacy, and that a further delay to reducing the deficit is sensible. We still though will be facing cuts that look unachievable, if that is the party doesn't now renege on its promise to not raise VAT, to posit just one thing it could do instead.
As promised by Cameron, the starting gun on the EU referendum has sounded. Let's assume the best: that Cameron gets something from Angela Merkel and the rest that allows him to claim he has successfully renegotiated our membership. Regardless of that, his backbenchers, looking over their shoulders at UKIP once again will be campaigning for the exit. The poll will not be about the benefits of the EU so much as what are seen as the negatives: the open borders, the loss of power, the amount we pay for barmy EU bureaucrats, and so forth. Even if the vote is a yes to stay in, the Scottish referendum has proved that once you've asked the question you will sooner or later have to ask it again, as it's guaranteed the result will be as close as the 55%-45% share north of the border.
Then we have the issue of Cameron himself. We know he's not going to serve a third term, so the party leadership battle begins here. At the same time as the EU referendum we're going to have Osborne, May and Boris battling it out, with all that implies for infighting in the party in and around the referendum. When you've won a majority on the back of being right-wing shitbags and those whose support you're trying to get are right-wing shitbags, why on earth would you then head back to the centre?
I could go on but that's probably enough and I'm sleep deprived as it is. To be slightly optimistic again, the Tories are still going to have trouble governing: their majority is smaller than it was in 1992, their backbenchers will be just as fractious as in the last parliament, and by-elections will dwindle it further.
Let's not lie to ourselves, all the same. Today's result is a disaster for those at the margins of society. It's a disaster for those who believe in internationalism, rather than nationalism. And it's the evidence we should have seen before that the left in England is fucked, probably irrevocably.
Have a good weekend.
Labels: elections 2015, politics, we're all doomed
| Permalink
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Erection special!
05:53:
Yeah, that's it. This is what you wanted Britain, this is what you're getting. I think the only thing left to do is reprise the only thing of worth Neil Kinnock might have ever said, only I've slightly altered it for 2015:
I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. If you're old, you're the only ones who will be protected. Everyone else will be fair game.
05:40:
The strange thing about all this is that turnout doesn't seem to have gone up dramatically, except again for Scotland. It might be 1 or 2 percentage points higher overall, but not to where you might have thought it was the turnout that swung it. Rather it seems to have been the weeks of deadlock that prompted the switch at the last minute, aligned with the SNP fearmongering and perhaps some renewed "shy Tories" shenanigans.
05:36:
Not that that's surprising when I feel sick to my stomach at what's happened.
05:26:
Ed Miliband looks to have aged 10 years in one night.
05:21:
Norwich South, the seat the exit poll had inexplicably flagged up as the other Green win, has gone to Labour with a near 8,000 majority over the Tories. Something went slightly haywire with your sample there lads.
05:14:
If by some freak of nature you're one of the 1,141 who voted Green in Bury North, where Labour's James Firth fell short by 378 votes of the Tories, hang your head in shame. It won't have made any difference, but still.
05:00:
Esther McVey has gone. Quite possibly the only bright spot of the entire night. That's how little we've had compared to the position we started from.
04:51:
Amazing. Clegg leads his party to a result so terrible they might have less than 10 seats, and yet he hangs on in Sheffield Hallam. Never has a win been less deserved.
04:47:
Vince Cable has gone. I've knocked Cable on here over the past few years for his bashing the Tories while remaining a minister, but there was the one hope if Clegg lost his seat of there being a Labour-Lib Dem pact of some variety.
Turned to dust, like so much else on this dreadful night/morning.
04:45:
The result we're looking at right now is quite possibly the worst of all possible worlds. An indecisive one would have had to put electoral reform back on the agenda, a point being made by Douglas Carswell, who could be UKIP's only MP. If the Tories either fall slightly short or scrape over the line, they have absolutely no reason to make any concessions on that front, and why should they? In Scotland, we now have a party that hates the Tories probably just marginally more than it does both Labour and the union in total control, and will spend every moment of its time at Westminster raising hell, shouting at the complete illegitimacy of whichever government we have. Add in how a referendum on EU membership is now certain, and which will in turn become not so much a vote on Europe as on immigration and the government itself, and to say the next five years look even bleaker than the 5 previous doesn't seem an understatement.
A few years back now I saw Simon Munnery, not long after he had (bizarrely) appeared on a panel on Newsnight alongside Greg Dyke on the AV referendum. Afterwards, according to Munnery, Paxman said to Dyke on the economic situation, "this country really is fucked, isn't it?"
If it wasn't then, it is now.
04:24:
Results flooding in now. Thurrock, Hendon, 2nd and 3rd on Labour target list, both remain Tory. It was over long ago, but seems to be confirming we're seeing a repeat of 1992 only sans the Sheffield victory rally.
04:17:
Lynne Featherstone has gone as well. She was one of those who demanded someone must resign over the death of Baby P, helping along the demonising of social workers that followed. Probably also worth pointing out that David Cameron's bright idea a few months back was that those in a position of authority who fail to protect their wards should face up to 5 years in prison. That, unfathomably, was one of his less wacky pre-election brainfarts.
04:11:
Simon Hughes has lost his seat. He you might recall defended the prisons book ban, and thus richly deserves to lose regardless of the good he has done previously. Not that it's going to make much frigging difference in Labour beating the Lib Dems at this point, sadly.
04:05:
By the way, hello to the one remaining person who seems to reading my ramblings now. And I don't mean myself. Apologies this hasn't been more insightful, but I'm trying not to start crying.
03:58:
Rare gain for Labour in Ilford North on a swing of 6.3% from the Tories, still adding up to a majority of just 589 mind. This was 84th on Labour's target list. What might have been had Labour managed that across the board.
03:41:
I'll say this right now: David Lammy shouldn't seek the London mayorship, he should seek the party leadership. Looking at all the other potential candidates, he's the only one even remotely inspiring.
03:33:
Incidentally, I haven't seen much evidence tonight of that fabled BBC bias. Labour figures might be in mourning, but the BBC presenters seem pretty buoyant, despite a Tory majority spelling the all but end of the licence fee. The SNP aren't great fans of Auntie either. Still, eh?
03:18:
I think I've gone very quickly through the 5 stages of grief tonight. Not that I was angry, I'm rarely angry these days. Despair has taken over on that score. Acceptance has already arrived though, don't worry.
03:16:
When I said vote, you bastards, I didn't mean vote for the bastards. Just to clear that up. Because clearly it's your fault.
03:11:
Jim Murphy has lost his seat. He looks demob happy, and again, who can blame him despite his utter uselessness.
02:59:
Story of the night is told by North Warwickshire result, Labour's number 1 target seat. In 2010, the Tories won by 54 votes. They've turned it into a majority of nigh on 3,000. Speechless.
02:54:
All the Labour people on so far look absolutely shell-shocked, not by Scotland, but by England results. Can't say I blame them.
02:45:
Swindon South, 2010 Conservative majority: 3,544
Swindon South, 2015 Conservative majority: 5,785
Labour has gone backwards. I repeat, Labour in the Tory marginals has gone backwards. Not a single person predicted this. In Scotland the polls were about right. In the rest of UK, completely and utterly wrong.
02:40:
Incidentally, don't worry about the constant references so far tonight to suicide. That's perfectly normal around here.
02:35:
I think at this point I have to stay up just to see if the Tories get a majority. Something to tell my, err, actually fuck knows who I'll tell. Probably the birds in the park when I'm sitting on the bench about to slit my wrists.
02:25:
Flying Rodent, who I don't think has been wrong about anything ever, tweeted this prediction this morning:
The Tories, having correctly and shamefully chosen a strategy of spite and resentment, to squeak it. 5 more shithouse years.
Closer than any other pundit it seems thus far.
02:17:
Tim Farron: We know the scale of nothing so far.
Indeed we don't. I really, truly hope the Conservatives aren't going to somehow squeeze a majority but as this point it looks possible.
02:00:
The Nuneaton result confirms it, if there was any doubt. A 2,069 Conservative majority in 2010 has turned, incredibly, into a majority of nigh on 5,000. Something major happened today that the polls failed completely to pick up on.
01:54:
Call me premature, but we may as well already get on with the post-mortem.
Any gains Labour will make, and there will be a few no doubt, are going to be wiped out by the losses in Scotland. Labour has fouled up there spectacularly: how did it not realise within a matter of weeks of the referendum result that almost all those who voted yes were going to vote SNP? Answer: years of neglect and taking its base for granted. With a dedicated campaign of listening and action it might, just might have been able to staunch the worst of the losses. What did it do? It elected Jim Murphy, the la-la not listening act went on, and the end result could be a complete wipe out. The party couldn't have bargained on Cameron's the SNP are going to crash the economy act, but it could have prevented him from being able to make the argument with such force.
Peter Mandelson, sad as it is to say, is right. Labour has been squeezed between two nationalisms. UKIP probably won't win more than 2 seats, but it looks as though it's on course to be the opposition to Labour in its northern heartlands. Meanwhile, in the seats Labour had to win to stand any chance, voters have gone to UKIP and the Greens, while the 2010 Lib Dem voters have split down the middle between the Tories and Labour rather than en masse heading left.
How much of the blame can be personally assigned to Ed Miliband is difficult as yet to ascertain. The gains in popularity he made during the campaign don't look to have been enough. As I wrote before, I honestly don't believe David Miliband or Alan Johnson would have made much if any of a difference. Even if the exit poll ends up being dead right, this isn't so much a vote for the Tories or against Labour (except in Scotland) as it is against the "threat" posed by the SNP to England. You can say again that's Labour and Ed Miliband's fault for not dealing with the SNP, and you'd be right, but this is hardly a vote of confidence either in David Cameron. With so much in his favour he should still have won a majority tonight, and that isn't going to happen. As said, it could still turn out that thanks to the vote against the Lib Dems, which is total, Cameron will still find it extremely difficult to govern. Let's not split hairs though, he will say he's won, and in truth he has. Second election or not, we've got another 5 years of the Tories coming up.
01:21:
I think the very best we can hope for now is the Tories don't get quite as many seats as predicted by the exit poll. If the Lib Dems have done that badly, then a difference of ten seats could be, as Ed Balls said earlier, the difference between the Tories being able to govern and not.
Battersea result, another swing to the Conservatives. Doomed.
01:08:
Oh, and the Lib Dems have mostly it seems gone Tory in the marginals. I missed them out. Easy to forget.
01:03:
What seems to have happened as always looks obvious in hindsight. More defectors from Labour to UKIP than expected. UKIP/Tory waverers went back to the Tories. Undecideds until the last minute went Tory. Mass scaremongering about the SNP seems to have worked, as the Tories were claiming it was. And we didn't expect it because the polls couldn't cope with the UKIP rise in support/couldn't tell us about undecideds properly.
What a horrible, horrible night.
00:50:
Swindon North result: 4.3% swing from Labour to Conservatives. 102nd Labour target seat.
I think it's over already.
00:48:
According to Isabel Hardman, Nigel Farage has failed in Thanet South. Not really much of a consolation when so many of the Tories set to be returned want precisely what he does.
Also looks as though Douglas Alexander has lost his seat. He had a majority of 16,000, and his SNP opponent is 20, yes that's 20 as in years, said she fantasised about headbutting Labour councillors and that no voters were gullible.
Fuck me.
00:34:
You know, you forget just how life threateningly terrible the hours are before the results proper start coming in are. I'm sitting here with the BBC on mute and am still just inches away from beating myself to death with a plastic bottle based on how many of these terrible, terrible cunts from all three parties have already been in my line of sight.
00:20:
So how are you all? Been to any good gigs lately? And what brand of rope do you recommend when it needs to be good and strong?
00:02:
Three seats down, number of Liberal Democrat deposits lost: 3.
P.S. The Greens also got more votes in all three than the Lib Dems.
23:58:
Please BBC, it is beyond pointless going through all these seats based on your forecast. If it's right there's plenty of time to beat us over the head with that later.
23:48:
If Nick Clegg has held on, that's the cherry on the gigantic shit sundae we're all going to have to chow down.
23:43:
Also I'm not sure that 2 constitutes a group.
23:39:
Natalie Bennett: If we have doubled our parliamentary representation and we are sending perhaps Darren Hall in Bristol West to join the brilliant Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion as a strong group of Green MPs in Parliament - then that will be a good result for the Green party.
Yeah, shame about the rest of the country, oh and the potential for keeping the temperature rise to 2C, but you carry on Natalie.
23:27:
Let's try and cheer ourselves up a bit, eh? Check out the balls on this fucking lecher (Yes, it's probably her old man or her electoral agent, but play along with me here):
23:06: Last bit of exit poll speculation after saying I wouldn't, I promise:
Nicola Sturgeon tonight: I'd treat the exit poll with HUGE caution. I'm hoping for a good night but I think 58 seats is unlikely!
Nicola Sturgeon tomorrow: The people of Scotland have spoken. A second independence referendum will be in the 2016 SNP Holyrood manifesto.
22:52:
Just to add, the poll is clearly wrong on one thing. If the Greens win another seat, I'll join Paddy Ashdown in eating a hat.
22:49:
Oh, and if it's right, what I said about the press having lost their influence? Saturday morning, the Mail, Sun, Telegraph, they'll all have "IT WOZ US WOT WON IT".
22:36:
The Labour line: coalition has lost its majority if exit poll is right. Come on, please. If it's right, the Tories have won. Simple as.
22:28:
Speculating about speculation is pointless. I just can't see how the exit poll could be so wrong though. Last night I was optimistic. Right now I am staring into the abyss.
22:05:
To bring a completely local anecdote into this, I saw a hell of a lot more people voting in the neighbouring safe Tory seat than I did 5 years ago. Only way I can possibly get my head round how the exit poll could be right. Still, the Lib Dems down to 9 seats? That's what I can't quite believe more than anything, or indeed Labour losing seats. As Mike Smithson has tweeted, if right, a complete disaster for all the polling firms and some major inquiries to be held. Oh, and we're all utterly boned. But that comes second, obvs.
22:01:
OK, if this exit poll is right I'm going to fucking shoot myself. With my imaginary gun.
21:58:
It's not until it's real that you remember just what a complete prat Jeremy Vine is.
21:42:
At this point, I think I can say if you voted for the party that used in all seriousness the slogan "BAIRNS NOT BAMBS" and put this out with the intention of winning over support:
You deserve everything you've got coming.
Yeah, that's it. This is what you wanted Britain, this is what you're getting. I think the only thing left to do is reprise the only thing of worth Neil Kinnock might have ever said, only I've slightly altered it for 2015:
I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. If you're old, you're the only ones who will be protected. Everyone else will be fair game.
05:40:
The strange thing about all this is that turnout doesn't seem to have gone up dramatically, except again for Scotland. It might be 1 or 2 percentage points higher overall, but not to where you might have thought it was the turnout that swung it. Rather it seems to have been the weeks of deadlock that prompted the switch at the last minute, aligned with the SNP fearmongering and perhaps some renewed "shy Tories" shenanigans.
05:36:
Not that that's surprising when I feel sick to my stomach at what's happened.
05:26:
Ed Miliband looks to have aged 10 years in one night.
05:21:
Norwich South, the seat the exit poll had inexplicably flagged up as the other Green win, has gone to Labour with a near 8,000 majority over the Tories. Something went slightly haywire with your sample there lads.
05:14:
If by some freak of nature you're one of the 1,141 who voted Green in Bury North, where Labour's James Firth fell short by 378 votes of the Tories, hang your head in shame. It won't have made any difference, but still.
05:00:
Esther McVey has gone. Quite possibly the only bright spot of the entire night. That's how little we've had compared to the position we started from.
04:51:
Amazing. Clegg leads his party to a result so terrible they might have less than 10 seats, and yet he hangs on in Sheffield Hallam. Never has a win been less deserved.
04:47:
Vince Cable has gone. I've knocked Cable on here over the past few years for his bashing the Tories while remaining a minister, but there was the one hope if Clegg lost his seat of there being a Labour-Lib Dem pact of some variety.
Turned to dust, like so much else on this dreadful night/morning.
04:45:
The result we're looking at right now is quite possibly the worst of all possible worlds. An indecisive one would have had to put electoral reform back on the agenda, a point being made by Douglas Carswell, who could be UKIP's only MP. If the Tories either fall slightly short or scrape over the line, they have absolutely no reason to make any concessions on that front, and why should they? In Scotland, we now have a party that hates the Tories probably just marginally more than it does both Labour and the union in total control, and will spend every moment of its time at Westminster raising hell, shouting at the complete illegitimacy of whichever government we have. Add in how a referendum on EU membership is now certain, and which will in turn become not so much a vote on Europe as on immigration and the government itself, and to say the next five years look even bleaker than the 5 previous doesn't seem an understatement.
A few years back now I saw Simon Munnery, not long after he had (bizarrely) appeared on a panel on Newsnight alongside Greg Dyke on the AV referendum. Afterwards, according to Munnery, Paxman said to Dyke on the economic situation, "this country really is fucked, isn't it?"
If it wasn't then, it is now.
04:24:
Results flooding in now. Thurrock, Hendon, 2nd and 3rd on Labour target list, both remain Tory. It was over long ago, but seems to be confirming we're seeing a repeat of 1992 only sans the Sheffield victory rally.
04:17:
Lynne Featherstone has gone as well. She was one of those who demanded someone must resign over the death of Baby P, helping along the demonising of social workers that followed. Probably also worth pointing out that David Cameron's bright idea a few months back was that those in a position of authority who fail to protect their wards should face up to 5 years in prison. That, unfathomably, was one of his less wacky pre-election brainfarts.
04:11:
Simon Hughes has lost his seat. He you might recall defended the prisons book ban, and thus richly deserves to lose regardless of the good he has done previously. Not that it's going to make much frigging difference in Labour beating the Lib Dems at this point, sadly.
04:05:
By the way, hello to the one remaining person who seems to reading my ramblings now. And I don't mean myself. Apologies this hasn't been more insightful, but I'm trying not to start crying.
03:58:
Rare gain for Labour in Ilford North on a swing of 6.3% from the Tories, still adding up to a majority of just 589 mind. This was 84th on Labour's target list. What might have been had Labour managed that across the board.
03:41:
I'll say this right now: David Lammy shouldn't seek the London mayorship, he should seek the party leadership. Looking at all the other potential candidates, he's the only one even remotely inspiring.
03:33:
Incidentally, I haven't seen much evidence tonight of that fabled BBC bias. Labour figures might be in mourning, but the BBC presenters seem pretty buoyant, despite a Tory majority spelling the all but end of the licence fee. The SNP aren't great fans of Auntie either. Still, eh?
03:18:
I think I've gone very quickly through the 5 stages of grief tonight. Not that I was angry, I'm rarely angry these days. Despair has taken over on that score. Acceptance has already arrived though, don't worry.
03:16:
When I said vote, you bastards, I didn't mean vote for the bastards. Just to clear that up. Because clearly it's your fault.
03:11:
Jim Murphy has lost his seat. He looks demob happy, and again, who can blame him despite his utter uselessness.
02:59:
Story of the night is told by North Warwickshire result, Labour's number 1 target seat. In 2010, the Tories won by 54 votes. They've turned it into a majority of nigh on 3,000. Speechless.
02:54:
All the Labour people on so far look absolutely shell-shocked, not by Scotland, but by England results. Can't say I blame them.
02:45:
Swindon South, 2010 Conservative majority: 3,544
Swindon South, 2015 Conservative majority: 5,785
Labour has gone backwards. I repeat, Labour in the Tory marginals has gone backwards. Not a single person predicted this. In Scotland the polls were about right. In the rest of UK, completely and utterly wrong.
02:40:
Incidentally, don't worry about the constant references so far tonight to suicide. That's perfectly normal around here.
02:35:
I think at this point I have to stay up just to see if the Tories get a majority. Something to tell my, err, actually fuck knows who I'll tell. Probably the birds in the park when I'm sitting on the bench about to slit my wrists.
02:25:
Flying Rodent, who I don't think has been wrong about anything ever, tweeted this prediction this morning:
The Tories, having correctly and shamefully chosen a strategy of spite and resentment, to squeak it. 5 more shithouse years.
Closer than any other pundit it seems thus far.
02:17:
Tim Farron: We know the scale of nothing so far.
Indeed we don't. I really, truly hope the Conservatives aren't going to somehow squeeze a majority but as this point it looks possible.
02:00:
The Nuneaton result confirms it, if there was any doubt. A 2,069 Conservative majority in 2010 has turned, incredibly, into a majority of nigh on 5,000. Something major happened today that the polls failed completely to pick up on.
01:54:
Call me premature, but we may as well already get on with the post-mortem.
Any gains Labour will make, and there will be a few no doubt, are going to be wiped out by the losses in Scotland. Labour has fouled up there spectacularly: how did it not realise within a matter of weeks of the referendum result that almost all those who voted yes were going to vote SNP? Answer: years of neglect and taking its base for granted. With a dedicated campaign of listening and action it might, just might have been able to staunch the worst of the losses. What did it do? It elected Jim Murphy, the la-la not listening act went on, and the end result could be a complete wipe out. The party couldn't have bargained on Cameron's the SNP are going to crash the economy act, but it could have prevented him from being able to make the argument with such force.
Peter Mandelson, sad as it is to say, is right. Labour has been squeezed between two nationalisms. UKIP probably won't win more than 2 seats, but it looks as though it's on course to be the opposition to Labour in its northern heartlands. Meanwhile, in the seats Labour had to win to stand any chance, voters have gone to UKIP and the Greens, while the 2010 Lib Dem voters have split down the middle between the Tories and Labour rather than en masse heading left.
How much of the blame can be personally assigned to Ed Miliband is difficult as yet to ascertain. The gains in popularity he made during the campaign don't look to have been enough. As I wrote before, I honestly don't believe David Miliband or Alan Johnson would have made much if any of a difference. Even if the exit poll ends up being dead right, this isn't so much a vote for the Tories or against Labour (except in Scotland) as it is against the "threat" posed by the SNP to England. You can say again that's Labour and Ed Miliband's fault for not dealing with the SNP, and you'd be right, but this is hardly a vote of confidence either in David Cameron. With so much in his favour he should still have won a majority tonight, and that isn't going to happen. As said, it could still turn out that thanks to the vote against the Lib Dems, which is total, Cameron will still find it extremely difficult to govern. Let's not split hairs though, he will say he's won, and in truth he has. Second election or not, we've got another 5 years of the Tories coming up.
01:21:
I think the very best we can hope for now is the Tories don't get quite as many seats as predicted by the exit poll. If the Lib Dems have done that badly, then a difference of ten seats could be, as Ed Balls said earlier, the difference between the Tories being able to govern and not.
Battersea result, another swing to the Conservatives. Doomed.
01:08:
Oh, and the Lib Dems have mostly it seems gone Tory in the marginals. I missed them out. Easy to forget.
01:03:
What seems to have happened as always looks obvious in hindsight. More defectors from Labour to UKIP than expected. UKIP/Tory waverers went back to the Tories. Undecideds until the last minute went Tory. Mass scaremongering about the SNP seems to have worked, as the Tories were claiming it was. And we didn't expect it because the polls couldn't cope with the UKIP rise in support/couldn't tell us about undecideds properly.
What a horrible, horrible night.
00:50:
Swindon North result: 4.3% swing from Labour to Conservatives. 102nd Labour target seat.
I think it's over already.
00:48:
According to Isabel Hardman, Nigel Farage has failed in Thanet South. Not really much of a consolation when so many of the Tories set to be returned want precisely what he does.
Also looks as though Douglas Alexander has lost his seat. He had a majority of 16,000, and his SNP opponent is 20, yes that's 20 as in years, said she fantasised about headbutting Labour councillors and that no voters were gullible.
Fuck me.
00:34:
You know, you forget just how life threateningly terrible the hours are before the results proper start coming in are. I'm sitting here with the BBC on mute and am still just inches away from beating myself to death with a plastic bottle based on how many of these terrible, terrible cunts from all three parties have already been in my line of sight.
00:20:
So how are you all? Been to any good gigs lately? And what brand of rope do you recommend when it needs to be good and strong?
00:02:
Three seats down, number of Liberal Democrat deposits lost: 3.
P.S. The Greens also got more votes in all three than the Lib Dems.
23:58:
Please BBC, it is beyond pointless going through all these seats based on your forecast. If it's right there's plenty of time to beat us over the head with that later.
23:48:
If Nick Clegg has held on, that's the cherry on the gigantic shit sundae we're all going to have to chow down.
23:43:
Also I'm not sure that 2 constitutes a group.
23:39:
Natalie Bennett: If we have doubled our parliamentary representation and we are sending perhaps Darren Hall in Bristol West to join the brilliant Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion as a strong group of Green MPs in Parliament - then that will be a good result for the Green party.
Yeah, shame about the rest of the country, oh and the potential for keeping the temperature rise to 2C, but you carry on Natalie.
23:27:
Let's try and cheer ourselves up a bit, eh? Check out the balls on this fucking lecher (Yes, it's probably her old man or her electoral agent, but play along with me here):
23:06: Last bit of exit poll speculation after saying I wouldn't, I promise:
Nicola Sturgeon tonight: I'd treat the exit poll with HUGE caution. I'm hoping for a good night but I think 58 seats is unlikely!
Nicola Sturgeon tomorrow: The people of Scotland have spoken. A second independence referendum will be in the 2016 SNP Holyrood manifesto.
22:52:
Just to add, the poll is clearly wrong on one thing. If the Greens win another seat, I'll join Paddy Ashdown in eating a hat.
22:49:
Oh, and if it's right, what I said about the press having lost their influence? Saturday morning, the Mail, Sun, Telegraph, they'll all have "IT WOZ US WOT WON IT".
22:36:
The Labour line: coalition has lost its majority if exit poll is right. Come on, please. If it's right, the Tories have won. Simple as.
22:28:
Speculating about speculation is pointless. I just can't see how the exit poll could be so wrong though. Last night I was optimistic. Right now I am staring into the abyss.
22:05:
To bring a completely local anecdote into this, I saw a hell of a lot more people voting in the neighbouring safe Tory seat than I did 5 years ago. Only way I can possibly get my head round how the exit poll could be right. Still, the Lib Dems down to 9 seats? That's what I can't quite believe more than anything, or indeed Labour losing seats. As Mike Smithson has tweeted, if right, a complete disaster for all the polling firms and some major inquiries to be held. Oh, and we're all utterly boned. But that comes second, obvs.
22:01:
OK, if this exit poll is right I'm going to fucking shoot myself. With my imaginary gun.
21:58:
It's not until it's real that you remember just what a complete prat Jeremy Vine is.
21:42:
At this point, I think I can say if you voted for the party that used in all seriousness the slogan "BAIRNS NOT BAMBS" and put this out with the intention of winning over support:
You deserve everything you've got coming.
Labels: elections 2015, politics
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Vote, you bastards.
That is all.
Oh, and I might be back tonight with some live blogging if I can be bothered. Or I might just leave it to everyone else and return on Friday. We'll see.
Oh, and I might be back tonight with some live blogging if I can be bothered. Or I might just leave it to everyone else and return on Friday. We'll see.
Labels: elections 2015
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Wednesday, May 06, 2015
A campaign of failure.
"All political careers end in failure," we often hear, a slight misquote of a line from Enoch Powell. These might be exceptions that prove the rule, but few can claim with a straight face that the careers of either Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan ended in failure. Thatcher was ditched by her party, yes, and arguably the Tories have never recovered from that singular moment of trauma, and yet who can deny that the legacy both she and Reagan left the West has not proved resilient since then? Not even the great crash of 2008 has led to a break with neoliberalism; if anything, quite the opposite, regardless of the rise of a few opposition movements.
Barring a complete shock, tomorrow's election results will demonstrate there are times when political failure is absolute, whether it ends careers immediately or not. The last polls all point either to a dead heat between Labour and the Tories, or a lead for the latter well within the margin of error. 6 weeks, or rather nigh on 5 months of campaigning by both has failed to shift opinion in any substantial way. All they've succeeded in doing is consolidating their support: that might not strictly be a failure in that it's just as important as winning over undecided voters, but it speaks of just how limited the terms of engagement have been.
Nor is it as if the main two haven't tried: the Conservatives have thrown every conceivable bribe at those they consider "their people" possible. The all but abolition of inheritance tax, the expansion of right to buy to housing associations, the promise of tax cuts to come, paid for by a brutal slashing of the social security budget, none of it has worked. Labour meanwhile affected to pinch the Tories' clothes on deficit reduction, pledging it would fall every year, guaranteed by a "budget responsibility" lock, the forerunner to the 6 pledge tombstone. The parties battled over whom could deny themselves the most potential revenue: the Tories would legislate to make raising income tax, national insurance and VAT illegal, while Labour said they would only put the top rate of income tax back to 50p. If this was meant to make voters believe just how serious they were about sticking to these fine words, it hasn't worked. Why would it when everyone can plainly see there's going to be a mass bartering session come Friday afternoon when another hung parliament is confirmed?
The failure has not just been political, however. If the 2015 election becomes known for anything, it will be as the one where newspapers confirmed they are as good as dead. This is not to say they no longer have any influence, as some risibly claim: quite the opposite. They might not have a direct impact on how people decide to vote, but they can define perceptions and shift attitudes fundamentally. Ed Miliband would not have been considered a complete no-hoper little more than a month ago if it had not been for the way he was persistently caricatured as a weird leftie nerd from almost as soon as he won the Labour leadership.
What has changed is the abandoning of all pretence of being the voice of their readers as opposed to the voice of their owners. The Sun straight up admitted its contempt for Ed Miliband was based around how the fiend hasn't ruled out breaking up Rupert Murdoch's continuing stranglehold on the media, something it would have never done in the past. Most egregious though has been the Telegraph, once respected by all for the dividing line between its news and comment, reduced by the Barclay brothers to prostituting itself without the slightest shame to the Conservatives, time and again turning its front page over to missives issued directly from CCHQ. Peter Oborne's exposing of the paper's sycophancy towards advertiser HSBC seems to have led to it straight up throwing in the towel, not so much as bothering to hide its bias. The Mail meanwhile with its non-dom owner Lord Rothermere savages Miliband as a "class war zealot" who will "destroy the nation", although when the paper has already described his deceased father as "THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN" it's barely possible to go any lower.
It wouldn't matter as much if there was the slightest evidence the monstering of Miliband and Labour was working, or if there was something resembling wit in the constant attacks. Putting Neil Kinnock's head in a light bulb and asking the last person in the country to turn out the lights if he won at least had the semblance of originality, of being a wounding attack. Reprinting the photograph of Miliband eating a bacon sandwich in a slightly comical fashion alongside a whole load of puns on pork is pathetic, nowhere near cutting enough and worst of all, obvious. The Sun of Kelvin MacKenzie's era, of Rebekah Brooks's era for goodness sake would have come up with something better. If nothing else, the Sun once knew how its readers' minds worked. As with the rest of the popular and indeed right-wing press, those days are gone and they're not coming back.
That at this point the right-wing media rather than eulogising about Cameron and his party is spending all its time attacking Miliband and questioning his party's legitimacy to govern itself demonstrates their and the Tories' abject failure. When all they've got is a year-old photograph, a five-year old joke of a letter and the prospect of a party in power that hasn't won an election, after 5 years of precisely that, little could be more pitiful.
Not that Cameron or the rest of the leaders have been held to account by the media as a whole. All the attempts to trip them up, to get the Tories to say where they'll make their cuts to welfare or how much Labour will borrow have been brushed aside. The interrogator who has caused politicians the most discomfort, Andrew Neil, has been doing so to an audience of politics nerds and the barely compos mentis, while tinsel tits Evan Davis was given the job of interviewing the leaders in prime time, bringing his brand of less tenacious and less insightful technique along with him. All the emphasis on trapping the parties in a gaffe has only had the result of making them risk averse above all else. The campaign as a whole has suffered from that choice.
If anyone's failure has been total, it must though David Cameron's. He's had every advantage a prime minister could hope for: an utterly servile media; a divided opposition with an unpopular leader; a growing economy; and the collapse of said opposition in its Scottish heartlands. The threat on the right from UKIP has subsided somewhat, helped by another failure in the shape of the wheels coming off Nigel Farage's bandwagon, and still Cameron hasn't been able to shift the polls in his favour. From the outset he's displayed every sign of not being interested, from the interview with James Landale where he said he wouldn't serve a third term, instantly starting the Tory leadership contest, to the cringe-inducing showing of "passion". If any other politician had claimed to be "bloody lively" and "pumped up" the ridicule would have been absolute, as it would if it was Miliband addressing empty cowsheds or dropping in on farmers for a spot of breakfast, or if the Labour leader had made the slip that the election would be "career defining". Calling him the poor man's Tony Blair doesn't really work any longer; not only did Blair win elections, Blair at least believed in things. Cameron as the profile by Matthew d'Aconservative in the Graun demonstrates believes in absolutely nothing.
Indeed, the only thing saving Cameron is Labour's collapse in Scotland. This isn't so much down to the success of Nicola Sturgeon as it is the carry on from the referendum and Scottish Labour's helpless flailing around trying to work out why it is this has happened now. There is a point to wondering why it is voters who've come to the conclusion they've been abandoned and ignored by the party they previously backed en masse would then transfer their allegiance to one single party en masse and think there'll be a different end result, but only as far as it goes. The only thing to be done now is to appeal to voters' better instincts: that every seat Labour loses in Scotland helps David Cameron regardless of what the SNP says about "locking the Tories" out. It also has to be emphasised that just as Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland and the rest of the country will never forgive Labour if it refuses to work with the SNP, it's also the case the SNP will never be forgiven if it refuses to vote for a minority Labour government's Queen speech on the specious grounds it doesn't end austerity.
5 years ago, the British people conspired to ensure no one won the election. Five years later and they seem all but certain to produce a result that adds up to the same thing, only with bells on. If this doesn't result in the political class considering just why it is they've become such failures and what to do about it, then they've missed the real message of this campaign. The same goes for a media that has never seemed more out of touch, talking to itself and only itself. Regardless of which party wins the most seats or manages to form a government, there's a reckoning coming. It's not going to be pretty.
Barring a complete shock, tomorrow's election results will demonstrate there are times when political failure is absolute, whether it ends careers immediately or not. The last polls all point either to a dead heat between Labour and the Tories, or a lead for the latter well within the margin of error. 6 weeks, or rather nigh on 5 months of campaigning by both has failed to shift opinion in any substantial way. All they've succeeded in doing is consolidating their support: that might not strictly be a failure in that it's just as important as winning over undecided voters, but it speaks of just how limited the terms of engagement have been.
Nor is it as if the main two haven't tried: the Conservatives have thrown every conceivable bribe at those they consider "their people" possible. The all but abolition of inheritance tax, the expansion of right to buy to housing associations, the promise of tax cuts to come, paid for by a brutal slashing of the social security budget, none of it has worked. Labour meanwhile affected to pinch the Tories' clothes on deficit reduction, pledging it would fall every year, guaranteed by a "budget responsibility" lock, the forerunner to the 6 pledge tombstone. The parties battled over whom could deny themselves the most potential revenue: the Tories would legislate to make raising income tax, national insurance and VAT illegal, while Labour said they would only put the top rate of income tax back to 50p. If this was meant to make voters believe just how serious they were about sticking to these fine words, it hasn't worked. Why would it when everyone can plainly see there's going to be a mass bartering session come Friday afternoon when another hung parliament is confirmed?
The failure has not just been political, however. If the 2015 election becomes known for anything, it will be as the one where newspapers confirmed they are as good as dead. This is not to say they no longer have any influence, as some risibly claim: quite the opposite. They might not have a direct impact on how people decide to vote, but they can define perceptions and shift attitudes fundamentally. Ed Miliband would not have been considered a complete no-hoper little more than a month ago if it had not been for the way he was persistently caricatured as a weird leftie nerd from almost as soon as he won the Labour leadership.
What has changed is the abandoning of all pretence of being the voice of their readers as opposed to the voice of their owners. The Sun straight up admitted its contempt for Ed Miliband was based around how the fiend hasn't ruled out breaking up Rupert Murdoch's continuing stranglehold on the media, something it would have never done in the past. Most egregious though has been the Telegraph, once respected by all for the dividing line between its news and comment, reduced by the Barclay brothers to prostituting itself without the slightest shame to the Conservatives, time and again turning its front page over to missives issued directly from CCHQ. Peter Oborne's exposing of the paper's sycophancy towards advertiser HSBC seems to have led to it straight up throwing in the towel, not so much as bothering to hide its bias. The Mail meanwhile with its non-dom owner Lord Rothermere savages Miliband as a "class war zealot" who will "destroy the nation", although when the paper has already described his deceased father as "THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN" it's barely possible to go any lower.
It wouldn't matter as much if there was the slightest evidence the monstering of Miliband and Labour was working, or if there was something resembling wit in the constant attacks. Putting Neil Kinnock's head in a light bulb and asking the last person in the country to turn out the lights if he won at least had the semblance of originality, of being a wounding attack. Reprinting the photograph of Miliband eating a bacon sandwich in a slightly comical fashion alongside a whole load of puns on pork is pathetic, nowhere near cutting enough and worst of all, obvious. The Sun of Kelvin MacKenzie's era, of Rebekah Brooks's era for goodness sake would have come up with something better. If nothing else, the Sun once knew how its readers' minds worked. As with the rest of the popular and indeed right-wing press, those days are gone and they're not coming back.
That at this point the right-wing media rather than eulogising about Cameron and his party is spending all its time attacking Miliband and questioning his party's legitimacy to govern itself demonstrates their and the Tories' abject failure. When all they've got is a year-old photograph, a five-year old joke of a letter and the prospect of a party in power that hasn't won an election, after 5 years of precisely that, little could be more pitiful.
Not that Cameron or the rest of the leaders have been held to account by the media as a whole. All the attempts to trip them up, to get the Tories to say where they'll make their cuts to welfare or how much Labour will borrow have been brushed aside. The interrogator who has caused politicians the most discomfort, Andrew Neil, has been doing so to an audience of politics nerds and the barely compos mentis, while tinsel tits Evan Davis was given the job of interviewing the leaders in prime time, bringing his brand of less tenacious and less insightful technique along with him. All the emphasis on trapping the parties in a gaffe has only had the result of making them risk averse above all else. The campaign as a whole has suffered from that choice.
If anyone's failure has been total, it must though David Cameron's. He's had every advantage a prime minister could hope for: an utterly servile media; a divided opposition with an unpopular leader; a growing economy; and the collapse of said opposition in its Scottish heartlands. The threat on the right from UKIP has subsided somewhat, helped by another failure in the shape of the wheels coming off Nigel Farage's bandwagon, and still Cameron hasn't been able to shift the polls in his favour. From the outset he's displayed every sign of not being interested, from the interview with James Landale where he said he wouldn't serve a third term, instantly starting the Tory leadership contest, to the cringe-inducing showing of "passion". If any other politician had claimed to be "bloody lively" and "pumped up" the ridicule would have been absolute, as it would if it was Miliband addressing empty cowsheds or dropping in on farmers for a spot of breakfast, or if the Labour leader had made the slip that the election would be "career defining". Calling him the poor man's Tony Blair doesn't really work any longer; not only did Blair win elections, Blair at least believed in things. Cameron as the profile by Matthew d'Aconservative in the Graun demonstrates believes in absolutely nothing.
Indeed, the only thing saving Cameron is Labour's collapse in Scotland. This isn't so much down to the success of Nicola Sturgeon as it is the carry on from the referendum and Scottish Labour's helpless flailing around trying to work out why it is this has happened now. There is a point to wondering why it is voters who've come to the conclusion they've been abandoned and ignored by the party they previously backed en masse would then transfer their allegiance to one single party en masse and think there'll be a different end result, but only as far as it goes. The only thing to be done now is to appeal to voters' better instincts: that every seat Labour loses in Scotland helps David Cameron regardless of what the SNP says about "locking the Tories" out. It also has to be emphasised that just as Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland and the rest of the country will never forgive Labour if it refuses to work with the SNP, it's also the case the SNP will never be forgiven if it refuses to vote for a minority Labour government's Queen speech on the specious grounds it doesn't end austerity.
5 years ago, the British people conspired to ensure no one won the election. Five years later and they seem all but certain to produce a result that adds up to the same thing, only with bells on. If this doesn't result in the political class considering just why it is they've become such failures and what to do about it, then they've missed the real message of this campaign. The same goes for a media that has never seemed more out of touch, talking to itself and only itself. Regardless of which party wins the most seats or manages to form a government, there's a reckoning coming. It's not going to be pretty.
Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, election 2015, Labour, Liberal Democrats, media analysis, politics, tabloid analysis, Tories
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Tuesday, May 05, 2015
We still need a Labour government.
So here we are. With less than 48 hours until the polls open there is just the one thing that can be said for certain about what's going to happen once the votes start being counted: that absolutely no one has the first fucking idea about what's going to happen once the votes start being counted.
Obviously, we can make a few informed assumptions based on the polling evidence up to now. The SNP are going to win a lot of seats in Scotland; the Lib Dems will in all likelihood be left with around 30 seats all told; UKIP will be lucky to win 3 seats, but their share of the vote could still wreak havoc on the Tories in the marginals; Caroline Lucas will in all likelihood hold on to her seat in Brighton, but it will take a miracle for the Greens to win anywhere else, with the possibility their share of the vote could also hinder Labour in some seats; and just to keep this somewhat wieldy, tactical voting will almost certainly be more important than ever.
Everything else is cast in doubt. Without exaggeration, this is the first election in a generation where so much is uncertain. In 2010 it was fairly apparent there would be a hung parliament and the Conservatives would be the largest party. While a hung parliament remains all but certain this time, and it's also probable the Tories will end up with the most seats and the most votes, Labour could well be close enough on the former measure at least for the question of "legitimacy" to not rear its head in the way Cameron and friends, including Nick Clegg, imagine it will. Alternatively, and as some have began to argue, the polls could as in 1992 be wrong. The Tories might be within touching distance, not of a majority, but enough seats to govern in a coalition with the Lib Dems alongside confidence and supply from the DUP. Many are also still to make up their minds, or will be doing so now. Generally, the incumbent gets the benefit of the doubt.
Or it could be the exact opposite and we might be stuck in a situation come Friday morning where neither Labour or the Tories can make a minority government, let alone a coalition work. The Conservative strategy should this happen seems to be, with support from their friends in the press, to do absolutely everything in their power to remain in government, right up to the point of defeat on a Queen's speech. Gordon Brown had the decency it should be remembered to accept the numbers simply weren't in his favour in 2010, and resigned sooner than he perhaps constitutionally had to. If the Tories fail, Labour will invariably try and govern in a minority relying on SNP, Plaid and Green support as and when it comes, and may well persuade the DUP also to vote in their favour. Minority government as some have also reminded us is not just about persuading those nominally on your side, but also those on the other side; would the Tories vote down a Labour Queen's speech or budget that didn't give in to SNP demands for instance? Would the Tories really vote down a bill on replacing Trident as one of their MPs suggested?
One thing that can be said with certainty about the campaign as opposed to the outcome is that it has not once captured the imagination of anyone, let alone the country at large. Nor has the gap between the two main parties, which is also larger than it has been for a generation, been communicated to so many of those struggling as to how to vote. Labour and Conservative spending plans, while seemingly not that different, with both saying austerity will continue, in fact diverge massively. Labour's plans allow it to borrow £25bn or more a year to invest; the Tories promise a slashing of the state so big that it's frankly inconceivable they would go through with it. As passed judgement on by the IFS, none of the plans on offer as explained in the manifestos are truly credible, but the Tories' are the most outlandish by far.
With the result so unpredictable, it's slightly premature to pass full verdict on the campaigns. Nonetheless, to judge the Conservative campaign on how Lynton Crosby kept insisting there would come a "crossover" point, with the Tories taking a decisive lead, both he and David Cameron have clearly failed. Such has been the dismal fare served up by the Conservatives over the past six weeks, a campaign that was meant to focus on two things, the economy and Ed Miliband has finished up instead focusing on just one, the danger of a Labour government propped up by the SNP. The personal attacks on Miliband that promised to define the campaign ended within 2 weeks once the party realised they had stopped having an effect; the economy followed suit shortly after. A party that on the surface has a respected leader with a good story to tell on a growing economy has been reduced to little more than pointing at a "dangerous" Scotswoman to stay in power. Even more depressing is it might yet work.
The Labour campaign (outside of Scotland, at least) has by contrast made only slight missteps, like the spectacularly ill-judged "Edstone" unveiled at the weekend. Considering the thin meat of the pledges on that (mill)stone, Miliband has consistently played a weak hand well. Anyone surprised by how he hasn't been a complete disaster fell into believing the bullshit spread not just by the right-wing media but also from some within his party, convinced Labour can't win if it tacks even slightly to the left. Labour won't win outright, but anyone who claims with a straight face that his brother, Alan Johnson or someone in the shadow cabinet would have done a better job is lying to themselves. Labour alone out of the parties has kept campaigning up to the last, has tried to do things (slightly) differently, whether it be Miliband agreeing to be interviewed by Russell Brand or even today appearing on a fashion vlogger's channel, and has at the very least attempted to be positive. Trying to return to government after a single term out of office is always going to be a struggle, especially when Labour's exhaustion in 2010 was so total, the Tory narrative of the crash and the recession accepted without question by so much of the media and the public. If Miliband's last 5 years should be judged on anything, it ought to be on whom the high priests of capital have declared for: the FT and the Economist both want a continuation of the coalition, despite the impact an EU referendum could have. Indeed, in the media at large it seems only the Mirror and Guardian will end up supporting Labour, with the Indie also calling for a coalition: Miliband has scared the right people in precisely the right way.
If plenty of voters are still undecided, they can hardly be blamed for being so. The campaigns at large have for the most part been ridiculously safe, neither the Conservatives or Labour wanting to be seen to have committed a "gaffe". This is in spite of the one truly electrifying moment of the campaign being last week's Question Time debate, although contrarily I'd still say the opposition debate was better in quality overall. All three of the leaders stood up well to a barrage of hostile questioning, precisely the kind they have spent so much of the campaign trying to avoid lest it be judged they screwed up or were secretly recorded insulting their interrogator. David Cameron's debate avoiding gambit has undoubtedly paid off, but certainly not to the extent the Tories must have hoped; by the same token, Ed Miliband's personal ratings have improved, but not to the extent Labour must have hoped had the one-on-one debate Labour demanded taken place. Whoever leads the next government, something has to be done to make sure the prime minister of the day is not able to both prevaricate and dictate to the broadcasters over the debates in such a way again.
As I wrote at the end of March, and nothing since has happened to change my mind one iota, in fact quite the opposite, we need a Labour government. Whether it's a Labour minority government, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, a Labour government with an extremely slim majority, whatever the outcome, what's on offer from Ed Miliband's Labour party is preferable to that of David Cameron's Conservative party. This is not always down to Labour's policies being superior, although they nearly always are, so much as the Tories' being destructive, cruel and discriminatory. When the party can't so much as bring itself to include the "spare room subsidy" in its manifesto, at the same time as it proposes to cut a further £12bn from welfare while refusing to say where, the lack of honesty ought to be causing far more ructions than it has. Such has been the Conservative way of denying their policies have affected anyone who isn't a scrounger or a work-shy layabout: food banks haven't expanded because of the astronomical rise in benefit sanctions, but as the JobCentre can now refer people to them. Pensioners have been protected as both the working and unemployed poor are told "we are all in this together". To the Conservatives a job, any job, is a way out; Labour under Miliband has recognised that work increasingly doesn't pay.
How we then get to a Labour government is the real question. To start off with the easy stuff: if, like Chris, you live in either a rock solid Tory or for that matter Labour seat where the nearest challenger has no hope, feel free to vote Green, TUSC or however you feel. From there on it gets trickier: fairly obviously, if you're in a marginal where Labour has any chance, with the one exception of the sitting MP being an utter cock, vote Labour. I'm fairly certain the sitting Tory in my constituency will hold on with a reasonably comfortable majority, but I'm voting Labour just in case. Where the choice is between the Lib Dems and the Tories, it's a far more difficult decision. The best possible remotely plausible outcome to my mind will be a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, but for that to happen both parties need to do better than the polls suggest. It would almost certainly require in addition for Nick Clegg to lose in Sheffield Hallam. When Matthew d'Anconservative says Clegg retaining his seat is key to the Tory clinging to power strategy, it's evident removing the Lib Dem leader is vital. The problem is not knowing if yesterday's ICM poll suggesting Clegg will win fairly comfortably is more reliable than the Ashcroft polling saying it's too close to call. Those in the Tory-Lib Dem marginals may well have to play it by ear and vote Lib Dem despite every instinct screaming they're boned whichever way it goes. Much the same goes for those few seats in Scotland where it's either the SNP or the Lib Dems, although we can make an exception for Danny Alexander. Finally, in Brighton Pavilion a vote for Caroline Lucas so long as you can separate the MP from the underperforming Green council ought to be a gimme.
Lastly, if the UKIP and Green shares of the vote hold up, voting reform will surely have to be looked at again. If the SNP win 40 or more seats on the back of a 5% share of the vote while UKIP win 3 or less on a percentage that could be double that, something will have to give. It will hopefully also finally get through to the blockheads in the Tories that the way things are going they might never win a majority under FPTP again; no reason then to continue blocking a system that has the potential to make every vote count. Until that happens, it's a question of holding our noses and voting for the least worst viable option. And even if you disagree with everything I've wrote here, voting regardless of who for is always better than the alternative.
Obviously, we can make a few informed assumptions based on the polling evidence up to now. The SNP are going to win a lot of seats in Scotland; the Lib Dems will in all likelihood be left with around 30 seats all told; UKIP will be lucky to win 3 seats, but their share of the vote could still wreak havoc on the Tories in the marginals; Caroline Lucas will in all likelihood hold on to her seat in Brighton, but it will take a miracle for the Greens to win anywhere else, with the possibility their share of the vote could also hinder Labour in some seats; and just to keep this somewhat wieldy, tactical voting will almost certainly be more important than ever.
Everything else is cast in doubt. Without exaggeration, this is the first election in a generation where so much is uncertain. In 2010 it was fairly apparent there would be a hung parliament and the Conservatives would be the largest party. While a hung parliament remains all but certain this time, and it's also probable the Tories will end up with the most seats and the most votes, Labour could well be close enough on the former measure at least for the question of "legitimacy" to not rear its head in the way Cameron and friends, including Nick Clegg, imagine it will. Alternatively, and as some have began to argue, the polls could as in 1992 be wrong. The Tories might be within touching distance, not of a majority, but enough seats to govern in a coalition with the Lib Dems alongside confidence and supply from the DUP. Many are also still to make up their minds, or will be doing so now. Generally, the incumbent gets the benefit of the doubt.
Or it could be the exact opposite and we might be stuck in a situation come Friday morning where neither Labour or the Tories can make a minority government, let alone a coalition work. The Conservative strategy should this happen seems to be, with support from their friends in the press, to do absolutely everything in their power to remain in government, right up to the point of defeat on a Queen's speech. Gordon Brown had the decency it should be remembered to accept the numbers simply weren't in his favour in 2010, and resigned sooner than he perhaps constitutionally had to. If the Tories fail, Labour will invariably try and govern in a minority relying on SNP, Plaid and Green support as and when it comes, and may well persuade the DUP also to vote in their favour. Minority government as some have also reminded us is not just about persuading those nominally on your side, but also those on the other side; would the Tories vote down a Labour Queen's speech or budget that didn't give in to SNP demands for instance? Would the Tories really vote down a bill on replacing Trident as one of their MPs suggested?
One thing that can be said with certainty about the campaign as opposed to the outcome is that it has not once captured the imagination of anyone, let alone the country at large. Nor has the gap between the two main parties, which is also larger than it has been for a generation, been communicated to so many of those struggling as to how to vote. Labour and Conservative spending plans, while seemingly not that different, with both saying austerity will continue, in fact diverge massively. Labour's plans allow it to borrow £25bn or more a year to invest; the Tories promise a slashing of the state so big that it's frankly inconceivable they would go through with it. As passed judgement on by the IFS, none of the plans on offer as explained in the manifestos are truly credible, but the Tories' are the most outlandish by far.
With the result so unpredictable, it's slightly premature to pass full verdict on the campaigns. Nonetheless, to judge the Conservative campaign on how Lynton Crosby kept insisting there would come a "crossover" point, with the Tories taking a decisive lead, both he and David Cameron have clearly failed. Such has been the dismal fare served up by the Conservatives over the past six weeks, a campaign that was meant to focus on two things, the economy and Ed Miliband has finished up instead focusing on just one, the danger of a Labour government propped up by the SNP. The personal attacks on Miliband that promised to define the campaign ended within 2 weeks once the party realised they had stopped having an effect; the economy followed suit shortly after. A party that on the surface has a respected leader with a good story to tell on a growing economy has been reduced to little more than pointing at a "dangerous" Scotswoman to stay in power. Even more depressing is it might yet work.
The Labour campaign (outside of Scotland, at least) has by contrast made only slight missteps, like the spectacularly ill-judged "Edstone" unveiled at the weekend. Considering the thin meat of the pledges on that (mill)stone, Miliband has consistently played a weak hand well. Anyone surprised by how he hasn't been a complete disaster fell into believing the bullshit spread not just by the right-wing media but also from some within his party, convinced Labour can't win if it tacks even slightly to the left. Labour won't win outright, but anyone who claims with a straight face that his brother, Alan Johnson or someone in the shadow cabinet would have done a better job is lying to themselves. Labour alone out of the parties has kept campaigning up to the last, has tried to do things (slightly) differently, whether it be Miliband agreeing to be interviewed by Russell Brand or even today appearing on a fashion vlogger's channel, and has at the very least attempted to be positive. Trying to return to government after a single term out of office is always going to be a struggle, especially when Labour's exhaustion in 2010 was so total, the Tory narrative of the crash and the recession accepted without question by so much of the media and the public. If Miliband's last 5 years should be judged on anything, it ought to be on whom the high priests of capital have declared for: the FT and the Economist both want a continuation of the coalition, despite the impact an EU referendum could have. Indeed, in the media at large it seems only the Mirror and Guardian will end up supporting Labour, with the Indie also calling for a coalition: Miliband has scared the right people in precisely the right way.
If plenty of voters are still undecided, they can hardly be blamed for being so. The campaigns at large have for the most part been ridiculously safe, neither the Conservatives or Labour wanting to be seen to have committed a "gaffe". This is in spite of the one truly electrifying moment of the campaign being last week's Question Time debate, although contrarily I'd still say the opposition debate was better in quality overall. All three of the leaders stood up well to a barrage of hostile questioning, precisely the kind they have spent so much of the campaign trying to avoid lest it be judged they screwed up or were secretly recorded insulting their interrogator. David Cameron's debate avoiding gambit has undoubtedly paid off, but certainly not to the extent the Tories must have hoped; by the same token, Ed Miliband's personal ratings have improved, but not to the extent Labour must have hoped had the one-on-one debate Labour demanded taken place. Whoever leads the next government, something has to be done to make sure the prime minister of the day is not able to both prevaricate and dictate to the broadcasters over the debates in such a way again.
As I wrote at the end of March, and nothing since has happened to change my mind one iota, in fact quite the opposite, we need a Labour government. Whether it's a Labour minority government, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, a Labour government with an extremely slim majority, whatever the outcome, what's on offer from Ed Miliband's Labour party is preferable to that of David Cameron's Conservative party. This is not always down to Labour's policies being superior, although they nearly always are, so much as the Tories' being destructive, cruel and discriminatory. When the party can't so much as bring itself to include the "spare room subsidy" in its manifesto, at the same time as it proposes to cut a further £12bn from welfare while refusing to say where, the lack of honesty ought to be causing far more ructions than it has. Such has been the Conservative way of denying their policies have affected anyone who isn't a scrounger or a work-shy layabout: food banks haven't expanded because of the astronomical rise in benefit sanctions, but as the JobCentre can now refer people to them. Pensioners have been protected as both the working and unemployed poor are told "we are all in this together". To the Conservatives a job, any job, is a way out; Labour under Miliband has recognised that work increasingly doesn't pay.
How we then get to a Labour government is the real question. To start off with the easy stuff: if, like Chris, you live in either a rock solid Tory or for that matter Labour seat where the nearest challenger has no hope, feel free to vote Green, TUSC or however you feel. From there on it gets trickier: fairly obviously, if you're in a marginal where Labour has any chance, with the one exception of the sitting MP being an utter cock, vote Labour. I'm fairly certain the sitting Tory in my constituency will hold on with a reasonably comfortable majority, but I'm voting Labour just in case. Where the choice is between the Lib Dems and the Tories, it's a far more difficult decision. The best possible remotely plausible outcome to my mind will be a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, but for that to happen both parties need to do better than the polls suggest. It would almost certainly require in addition for Nick Clegg to lose in Sheffield Hallam. When Matthew d'Anconservative says Clegg retaining his seat is key to the Tory clinging to power strategy, it's evident removing the Lib Dem leader is vital. The problem is not knowing if yesterday's ICM poll suggesting Clegg will win fairly comfortably is more reliable than the Ashcroft polling saying it's too close to call. Those in the Tory-Lib Dem marginals may well have to play it by ear and vote Lib Dem despite every instinct screaming they're boned whichever way it goes. Much the same goes for those few seats in Scotland where it's either the SNP or the Lib Dems, although we can make an exception for Danny Alexander. Finally, in Brighton Pavilion a vote for Caroline Lucas so long as you can separate the MP from the underperforming Green council ought to be a gimme.
Lastly, if the UKIP and Green shares of the vote hold up, voting reform will surely have to be looked at again. If the SNP win 40 or more seats on the back of a 5% share of the vote while UKIP win 3 or less on a percentage that could be double that, something will have to give. It will hopefully also finally get through to the blockheads in the Tories that the way things are going they might never win a majority under FPTP again; no reason then to continue blocking a system that has the potential to make every vote count. Until that happens, it's a question of holding our noses and voting for the least worst viable option. And even if you disagree with everything I've wrote here, voting regardless of who for is always better than the alternative.
Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, election 2015, Labour, Liberal Democrats, so who do we vote for now, Tories
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